Writing a Samba VFS Module

From SambaWiki
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Introduction

Since there have been significant changes between Samba 3.x (and earlier) and Samba 4.0 and above, I thought I would start a new document on this topic rather than trying to overload the earlier document with more complex versions specific differences.

The remaining sections deal with:

  1. The Samba VFS Layer contains a discussion of the VFS Layer.
  2. Building your VFS module contains a discussion of how to get your module build.
  3. Etc.

The Samba VFS Layer

The Samba VFS provides a mechanism to allow people to extend the functionality of Samba in useful ways. Some examples are:

  1. Convert NTFS ACLs to NFSv4 ACLs for storing in a file system that supports them. The GPFS VFS module does this and the same could be done for Linux when RichACL support is complete.
  2. Support features that a vendor has implemented in their file system that Linux file systems do not support. # The OneFS VFS module from Isilon interfaces with their in-kernel distributed file system which provides more complete NTFS functionality, including four file times, etc.
  3. Implement features like Alternate Data Streams.
  4. Implement full NT ACL support by storing them in XATTRs and correctly handling the semantics (see source3/modules/vfs_acl_xattr.c and source3/modules/vfs_acl_common.c.)
  5. Support user-space file systems, perhaps accessible via a shared memory interface or via a user-space library (eg, Ceph's libceph.) Modules that do this are vfs_ceph.c and vfs_glusterfs.c
  6. A Samba VFS is a shared library (eg, acl_xattr.so), or module, that implements some or all of the functions that the Samba VFS interface makes available to provides the desired functionality. In addition VFS modules can be stacked (if they have been written for that), and there is a default VFS (source3/modules/vfs_default.c) that provides the default Samba functionality for those functions that are not implemented higher in the stack or that earlier modules also call.

The following diagrams help illustrate some of the concepts in more detail. Samba-vfs-diag-1.gif

Building Your VFS Module

To be continued.