Samba 4.12 Released
March 3, the Samba team released ‘Samba 4.12.0’, implementation of Windows services, like Windows file sharing, for Linux/UNIX. There are notable improvements added to the release, for example enhanced performance brought forth by adopting GnuTLS.
Samba is a software suite that offers necessary Windows-interoperability components for UNIX. To be specific, it offers file sharing and printing service that uses SMB/CIFS protocol, and integration feature with Active Directory.
Samba 4.12 is the latest release of the Samba 4th series, whose GA release first came out at the beginning of 2012. With respect to encryption, the team is working on shifting to the externally maintained libraries, and the latest release adopted GnuTLS for encryption technology. From here on, in-tree cryptography will not be included other than the MD4 hash implemented in Heimdal. It is expected that this change improves the performance, and according to the tests with CIFS Kernel client from Linux 5.3, the speed is improved by 3 times for writing, and 2.5 times for reading.
It also includes samba-tool improvements. It now allows ‘samba-tool group addmemers’ to add contacts as members of groups. Filtering has been enhanced as well.
To build Samba, now zlib library is required. Also, the minimum runtime requirement for Python is raised to Python 3.5.
As to improved VFS, it is added with a new module to make use of the io_uring infrastructure, and MS-DFS redirects are also improved.
Samba 4.12 is available on the project website