samba - May 2024 - Async Query Directory (for VFS)

Hi, is there a branch, patch or other attempts I can look at for async
processing of SMB2 QUERY_DIRECTORY? Looking online I see proposals from years
ago for making everything async but I don't know what happened to it?

In my use case, I don't care as much about impersonation and security as
it's being used for client only loopback on Mac, process running as the
logged in user. I have a custom VFS that accesses remote object storage but
Spotlight (mds) on MacOS trawls recursively in background resulting in lots of
slow directory queries which are being processed synchronously, despite handing
preads and pwrites asynchronously. It makes for a not great user experience when
the MacOS rainbow beachball shows up and otherwise smooth reads are interrupted.

Any pointers appreciated to figure this out.

Kind regards, 
   Dan

On 5/28/24 10:06 AM, Dan Greenfield via samba wrote:
> Hi, is there a branch, patch or other attempts I can look at for
> async processing of SMB2 QUERY_DIRECTORY? Looking online I see
> proposals from years ago for making everything async but I don't know
> what happened to it?
probably the same as to many other WIP branches: sitting there getting 
dusty. :)
> In my use case, I don't care as much about impersonation and security
> as it's being used for client only loopback on Mac, process running
> as the logged in user. I have a custom VFS that accesses remote
> object storage but Spotlight (mds) on MacOS trawls recursively in
> background resulting in lots of slow directory queries which are
> being processed synchronously, despite handing preads and pwrites
> asynchronously. It makes for a not great user experience when the
> MacOS rainbow beachball shows up and otherwise smooth reads are
> interrupted.
> 
> Any pointers appreciated to figure this out.
Async directory listing is certainly doable with a few weeks of work for 
someone really familiar with Samba internals.

Another thing you could try would be enabling spotlight on the server 
with the default noindex backend. Maybe the presence of *real* Spotlight 
on the server is enough to keep the client from falling back to what is 
likely the server-doesnt-support-spotlight mode.

Hth!
-slow

-- 
SerNet Samba Team Lead
Samba Support, Consulting and Development
Samba Team Member      https://samba.org/
SAMBA+ packages       https://samba.plus/

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