After 6 months of development Samba 4.25.0 has been released. Samba 4.25.0 is a continuation of the Samba 4 branch with full implementation of the domain controller and Active Directory service. This release is compatible with the Windows Server implementation and can serve all Microsoft-supported versions of Windows clients, including Windows 11. Samba 4 also functions as a file server, print service, and identity server, with the project code written in C and distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Key changes in Samba 4.25 include:
- Implementation of the protocol SMB3 with experimental support for persistent file handles (SMB2_CAP_PERSISTENT_HANDLES), allowing clients to work with open files after network connection loss, server restarts, or switching the load to a spare server. This feature eliminates the need to reopen files after a server failure, which is crucial for hosting virtual machines and clustered databases on a Samba file server.
- Introduction of the vfs_aio_ratelimit VFS module, enabling the setting of a rate limit that applies across the entire cluster, not just individual nodes. A background process called ratelimitd must run on each node to aggregate smbd processes’ activities and communicate with other nodes in the cluster to enforce restrictions.
- Addition of the vfs_ceph_rgw VFS module for Ceph RGW (Object Gateway), which allows exporting data from Ceph Object Gateway as SMB storage with a hierarchical representation of stored objects as regular files and directories with access separation at the POSIX uid/gid level.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.