[gpfsug-discuss] SMB access speed

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On 28/04/16 22:04, Simon Thompson (Research Computing - IT Services) wrote:
> Ok, we are going to try this out and see if this makes a difference. The
> Windows server which is "faster" from Linux is running Server 2008R2, so
> I guess isn't doing encrypted SMB.
>

A quick poke in the Linux source code suggests that the CIFS encryption 
is handled with standard kernel crypto routines, but and here is the big 
but, whether you get any hardware acceleration is going to depend 
heavily on the CPU in the machine. Don't have the right CPU and you 
won't get it being done in hardware and the performance would I expect 
take a dive. I imagine it is like scp; making sure all your ducks are 
lined up and both server and client are doing hardware accelerated 
encryption is more complicated that it appears at first sight. Lots of 
lower end CPU's seem to be missing hardware accelerated encryption.

Anyway boot into Windows 7 and you get don't get encryption, connect to 
2008R2 and you don't get encryption and it all looks better. A quick 
Google suggests encryption didn't hit till Windows 8 and Server 2012.

JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                 Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
Fife, United Kingdom.