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Linux 6.6's in-kernel SMB networking server graduates
(www.theregister.com)
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Yeah, not sure about that either. Unless you have some kind of use case where you need every bit of performance out of this, this stuff belongs in user space.
And if performance was an issue, just throw more/better hardware at it.
The above text says that the aim is to do RDMA, to let the NIC access memory directly, but I'd think that existing Linux zero-copy interfaces would be sufficient for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-copy
So I'd think that the target workload has to be one where you can't just fetch a big chunk of pre-existing data, where you have to interject server-generated data in response to small requests, and even the overhead of switching to userspace to generate some kind of server-generated response is too high.
Which seems like a heck of a niche case.
But it obviously got approval from the kernel team.
googles
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/filesystems/smb/ksmbd.html
I guess you could accelerate open and close too.
In all seriousness, I feel like if you're in such a niche situation that you can't afford the overhead of going to userspace for that, (a) there's likely room to optimize your application to request different things and (b) CIFS might not be the best option to be sharing data over the network either.
Oh, so the attack surface is much bigger than I realized. The NIC is probably the last thing I'd want writing directly to memory and bypassing the kernel.
I guess none of this will be enabled in desktop distros or even the majority of server distros...right?
I was under the impression this is already the norm for network equipment because the vast amount of data is no longer processable by the kernel. In fairness though that equipment most likely doesn't really consume the data but rather just forwards.
Shouldn't
io_uring
solve the issues with speed between usermode and kernelmode?