Moving from smbfs to cifs
Garrett Cooper
yanefbsd at gmail.com
Mon Jun 9 18:02:46 UTC 2008
Hello all,
I was wondering if there's been any serious thought put into
migrating from smbfs (unmaintained project in kernel / userland since
2001) to cifs (currently supported Samba project). This is the
mount_smbfs user tool that's available in userland.
There are some related questions about this and observations
that I've made:
Pros:
1. cifs is the successor to smbfs, which is good from a
performance and feature enhancement end.
2. It's supported, which means that any bugs in the code can
be filed upstream and we'll be helped. This is an important point as I
appear to be hard locking up my system with some kind of non-MPSAFE
issue at kernel level on a very fresh copy of -CURRENT.
Cons:
1. cifs is currently Linux centric (it currently uses quite a
few Linux calls and references the Linux module code base); that will
need to be fixed.
2. It's GPL v2 licensed, which means that more GPL code will
"infect" the kernel, whereas smbfs was in a more BSD-like license
format.
So, my question would be "do the pros outweigh the cons for
attempting to migrate from smbfs to cifs in the kernel?"
Thanks,
-Garrett
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