Developing an In-kernel File Sharing Server Solution Based on Server Message Block protocol

Abstract

Multi-device and multi-service smart environments make heavy use of the Internet and intra-net, thus constantly transferring and saving large amounts of digital data leading to an exponential data growth. This has led to the development of network storage systems such as Storage Area Networks and Network Attached Storage. Network Attached Storage provides a file system level access to data from storage elements that are connected to the network. One of the most widely used protocols in network storage systems, is the Server Message Block(SMB) protocol, that interconnects users from various operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Samba is a popular open-source user-space server that implements the SMB protocol. There have been a multitude of discussions about moving traditional user-space applications like web servers to the kernel-space in order to improve various aspects of the server like CPU utilization, memory utilization, memory footprint, context switching, etc.

In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a server in the Linux kernel space. We discuss in detail, the features and functionalities of the newly implemented server. We provide an insight into why some of the design considerations were made, in order to improve the efficiency of protocol handling by the in-kernel file sharing server. We compare the performance of the user-space Samba solution with the in-kernel file sharing solution, implemented and discussed in this thesis, against different workloads to identify the competitiveness of the developed solution. We conclude by discussing what we learned, during the implementation process, along with some ideas for further improving the feature set and performance of the in-kernel server solution.