For Linux administrators who manage SMB/CIFS shares over networks, a big update is now available for installation. The developers of Samba are finally starting to remove in-tree cryptographic functionality and, instead, rely on externally maintained libraries. Those libraries come by way of GnuTLS 3.4.7 and bring to Samba improved encryption performance. This performance increase will equate to file transfers with encryption that are significantly faster than previous iterations. In fact, using GnuTLS for SMB3 encryption will bring three times faster writing and two and a half times faster reads on encrypted file transfers.

Other improvements brought about by Samba 4.12 include:

• Spotlight backend for Elasticsearch - this adds support for the macOS-specific Spotlight search protocol, thanks to the newly implemented Elasticsearch backend.
• Fuzzing - a significant number of fuzz targets have been added, as well as Samba’s inclusion in Google’s oss-fuzz cloud fuzzing service.
• Samba-tool improvements - Admins can now add contacts to groups and are able to filter by OU or subtree.
• VFS - Samba now uses a sentinel value to denote to-be-ignored timestamp variables that are passed to SMB_VFS_NTIMES(). There’s also a new io_uring VFS module that makes use of the new IO_uring infrastructure first introduced in Linux kernel 5.1. This addition brings faster, more efficient, IO for SMB/CIFS shares.

Find out more about Samba 4.12 in the official release notes.