KSMBD Has Finally Reached a Stable State (UPDATED)
KSMBD (Kernel SMB Daemon) is the in-kernel module, developed by Samsung, that implements the SMB/CIFS protocol for sharing files and folders over a network. SMB3 server could take the place of the traditional Samba software.
KSMBD was originally merged for Linux 5.15 but was tagged as experimental. That came about in 2021, and it's taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6.
But why is KSMBD important? First off, it promises considerable performance gains and better support for modern features such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). KSMBD also supports a number of features such as multiple dialects (SMB2.1, SMB3.0, SMB3.1), oplock cache mechanism, compound requests, ACL, and DCE/RPC.
UPDATE
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Linux 6.6's in-kernel SMB networking server graduates • The Register
The next release of the Linux kernel, 6.6, has hit release candidate status. As usual, it contains a number of new features, but we think one has more potential ramifications than all the others put together.
Linus Torvalds announced kernel 6.6-rc1 last night, and it includes the KSMBD in-kernel server for the SMB networking protocol, developed by Samsung's Namjae Jeon. We've covered his work a few times on The Reg, including as a possible stand-in maintainer for NTFS3 as well as maintaining support for Microsoft's exFAT disk format.