Monday, November 5, 2007

CIFS Support Added to OpenSolaris Kernel

Recently, Marc Hamilton announced that Sun has integrated Common Internet File System (CIFS), also known as SMB, the standard for Microsoft file sharing services, into Solaris. Marc observes:
By integrating the CIFS server directly into the Solaris kernel, CIFS now becomes a first class citizen in Solaris, and gets tight integration with NFS, ZFS, and Active Directory. Our CIFS implementation is certainly complementary to our work with the Samba community. The advantages of an in-kernel implementation is that we can provide much tighter integration of CIFS with other Solaris features, like ZFS
Bob Porras, engineering VP for Solaris storage in his blog lists recent additions of code and new opensolaris projects including:
Kernel based CIFS server (Build 77). That's right-- designed in as a first class citizen of the os with a kernel based protocol, tightly coupled with NFSv4, VFS, ZFS and Active Directory. Windows Interoperability. Another complimentary open sourced solution along side our friends from the SAMBA community. This service leverages the os and its capabilities. Need infinite snapshots of your CIFS files? Want file compression? Strive for encryption of your data? Not a problem. ZFS provides these data services IN the file system. The kernel based CIFS server source code will post here today. Need help with source code management tools click here.
Alan Wright has a detailed post that explains some of the details and history behind the project. He comments:
Windows interoperability also requires that a server support various Windows services, typically MSRPC services, and it is very sensitive to the way that those services behave: Windows interoperability requires that a CIFS server convince a Windows client or server that it "is Windows". This is really only possible if the operating system supports those services at a fundamental level.
And that's the goal of this large project. ( Over 800 files, approximately 370,000 lines of code, including 180,000 lines of new code)

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