[advocacy-discuss] Coverage: IT Jungle: OpenSolaris Project Weaves CIFS Server Into the Solaris Kernel

[Terri Molini]

Here's a nice story on the CIFS Server from Timothy.
-terri

 


 

 

OpenSolaris Project Weaves CIFS Server Into the Solaris Kernel

IT Jungle

Timothy Prickett-Morgan

November 29, 2007

http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug112907-story05.html

 

As Bob Porras, vice president of software engineering at Sun 
Microsystems explained in a blog entry this week, there are only two 
file sharing protocols that matter in the world: Network File System, or 
NFS, which was created by Sun two decades ago, and Common Internet File 
System, or CIFS, which is an update of the System Message Block (SMB) 
protocol that was created by IBM for PC DOS and later perfected by 
Microsoft for file serving on Windows.

 

The most popular open source implementation of SMB, which was 
reverse-engineered to be compatible with Windows and developed for Unix, 
Linux, and other platforms, is called Samba, and this software has been 
supported on various Unixes since it was first created by Andrew 
Tridgell in 1992. The problem with Samba, like other software, is 
performance. Which is why the OpenSolaris Project has recently announced 
that it is jamming the CIFS protocol a little lower into the Solaris 
platform--down into the kernel, to be precise.

 

To do SMB on a network, you have to do two things. You have to convince 
a Windows client that you are a Windows server--which the CIFS server 
does--and you have to convince a Windows server that you are a Windows 
client--which a parallel and existing project called OpenSolaris CIFS 
client already does. Of course, because SMB is a popular file sharing 
protocol, you can end up with a mix of Unix and Linux clients and 
servers, all pretending to be Windows. (If this doesn't make you laugh, 
I don't know what will.)

 

Because Sun has to support Solaris on X86 and X64 processors, which have 
a little endian byte order in memory, and on Sparc processors, which are 
big endian, it was a bit tricky to get the CIFS server running in the 
kernel for both processor architectures. Moreover, being completely 
compatible with Windows file serving means supporting other Windows 
services aside from SMB that are related to it, such as Microsoft Remote 
Procedure Call services, a Microsoft dialect of the open RPC standards 
already supported by Sun, which provide access control, file locking, 
and other functions. Sun has had to make tweaks to the Zettabyte File 
System and Virtual File System (the latter being a virtualization layer 
atop of the real file system that is used by Solaris and BSD Unixes) and 
various file system utilities that are used in Solaris to get the 
in-kernel CIFS server to work.

 

You can find out more about the in-kernel CIFS server for OpenSolaris in 
another blog, this one posted by Alan Wright, a senior software staff 
engineer at Sun who works on the OpenSolaris effort. It has all of the 
minute details about the CIFS server and why Sun is moving it into the 
kernel.

 

Sun expects to put the CIFS server into the forthcoming "Project 
Indiana" distribution of OpenSolaris, which is due in March 2008.

###

 

 



-- 
Terri Molini
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Global Communications
408/404-4976 office/fax; x6-9968
408/406-9021 mobile
IM: tmolini

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