Re: Moving from smbfs to cifs

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..

-- 
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