TODO — The Linux Kernel documentation

# TODO

As of 6.7 kernel. See https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFSKernel for list of features added by release

## A Partial List of Missing Features

Contributions are welcome. There are plenty of opportunities for visible, important contributions to this module. Here is a partial list of the known problems and missing features:

1. SMB3 (and SMB3.1.1) missing optional features: multichannel performance optimizations, algorithmic channel selection, directory leases optimizations, support for faster packet signing (GMAC), support for compression over the network, T10 copy offload ie “ODX” (copy chunk, and “Duplicate Extents” ioctl are currently the only two server side copy mechanisms supported)

2. Better optimized compounding and error handling for sparse file support, perhaps addition of new optional SMB3.1.1 fsctls to make collapse range and insert range more atomic

3. Support for SMB3.1.1 over QUIC (and perhaps other socket based protocols like SCTP)

4. quota support (needs minor kernel change since quota calls otherwise won’t make it to network filesystems or deviceless filesystems).

5. Additional use cases can be optimized to use “compounding” (e.g. open/query/close and open/setinfo/close) to reduce the number of roundtrips to the server and improve performance. Various cases (stat, statfs, create, unlink, mkdir, xattrs) already have been improved by using compounding but more can be done. In addition we could significantly reduce redundant opens by using deferred close (with handle caching leases) and better using reference counters on file handles.

6. Finish inotify support so kde and gnome file list windows will autorefresh (partially complete by Asser). Needs minor kernel vfs change to support removing D_NOTIFY on a file.

7. Add GUI tool to configure /proc/fs/cifs settings and for display of the CIFS statistics (started)

8. implement support for security and trusted categories of xattrs (requires minor protocol extension) to enable better support for SELINUX

9. Add support for tree connect contexts (see MS-SMB2) a new SMB3.1.1 protocol feature (may be especially useful for virtualization).

10. Create UID mapping facility so server UIDs can be mapped on a per mount or a per server basis to client UIDs or nobody if no mapping exists. Also better integration with winbind for resolving SID owners

11. Add tools to take advantage of more smb3 specific ioctls and features (passthrough ioctl/fsctl is now implemented in cifs.ko to allow sending various SMB3 fsctls and query info and set info calls directly from user space) Add tools to make setting various non-POSIX metadata attributes easier from tools (e.g. extending what was done in smb-info tool).

12. encrypted file support (currently the attribute showing the file is encrypted on the server is reported, but changing the attribute is not supported).

13. improved stats gathering tools (perhaps integration with nfsometer?) to extend and make easier to use what is currently in /proc/fs/cifs/Stats

14. Add support for claims based ACLs (“DAC”)

15. mount helper GUI (to simplify the various configuration options on mount)

16. Expand support for witness protocol to allow for notification of share move, and server network adapter changes. Currently only notifications by the witness protocol for server move is supported by the Linux client.

17. Allow mount.cifs to be more verbose in reporting errors with dialect or unsupported feature errors. This would now be easier due to the implementation of the new mount API.

18. updating cifs documentation, and user guide.

19. Addressing bugs found by running a broader set of xfstests in standard file system xfstest suite.

20. split cifs and smb3 support into separate modules so legacy (and less secure) CIFS dialect can be disabled in environments that don’t need it and simplify the code.

22. Additional testing of POSIX Extensions for SMB3.1.1

23. Support for the Mac SMB3.1.1 extensions to improve interop with Apple servers

24. Support for additional authentication options (e.g. IAKERB, peer-to-peer Kerberos, SCRAM and others supported by existing servers)

25. Improved tracing, more eBPF trace points, better scripts for performance analysis

## Known Bugs

See https://bugzilla.samba.org - search on product “CifsVFS” for current bug list. Also check http://bugzilla.kernel.org (Product = File System, Component = CIFS) and xfstest results e.g. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Xfstest-results-smb3

## Misc testing to do

1. check out max path names and max path name components against various server types. Try nested symlinks (8 deep). Return max path name in stat -f information

2. Improve xfstest’s cifs/smb3 enablement and adapt xfstests where needed to test cifs/smb3 better

3. Additional performance testing and optimization using iozone and similar - there are some easy changes that can be done to parallelize sequential writes, and when signing is disabled to request larger read sizes (larger than negotiated size) and send larger write sizes to modern servers.

4. More exhaustively test against less common servers

5. Continue to extend the smb3 “buildbot” which does automated xfstesting against Windows, Samba and Azure currently - to add additional tests and to allow the buildbot to execute the tests faster. The URL for the buildbot is: http://smb3-test-rhel-75.southcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com

6. Address various coverity warnings (most are not bugs per-se, but the more warnings are addressed, the easier it is to spot real problems that static analyzers will point out in the future).