Moving from smbfs to cifs

[Peter Wemm]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 6:53 PM, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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
>>
>> I was surprised to discover that smbfs works as well as it does.  I
>> really was expecting a whole pile of panics, lockups etc, but for my
>> usage level, it seems to just work.  On my smp desktop:
>>
>> peter at overcee[1:16pm]~/fbp4/hammer/sys/dev/twa-193> mount | grep smbfs | wc -l
>>       5
>> peter at overcee[1:17pm]~/fbp4/hammer/sys/dev/twa-194> uptime
>>  1:17PM  up 49 days, 21:46, 6 users, load averages: 0.29, 0.26, 0.17
>>
>> Maybe it'll all catch fire tomorrow..
>
> Well, I wish I had your luck Peter. Every time I try and mount my
> admin share on my Vista box (for testing purposes only now), the
> mount_smbfs proc locks up the kernel with a strange recursive lock
> error (I think that's what causes it at least; I can't attach kgdb or
> core dump the machine...

My goals are considerably lower.  I'm just mounting a Buffalo
Terastation, which is a tiny linux file server running samba.  Maybe
that helps keep things simple enough to work.  In any case, it was
easier for me to do that than to hack the nfs support into the server.

-Peter

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete
themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell