News › linux
By The Linux Camp News, October 29, 2026
The development-tree update expands KSMBD’s directory-response formats and adds session-slot accounting, alongside POSIX behavior corrections and restored ksmbd-tools compatibility.
KSMBD’s update for Linux 7.4-rc1 was confirmed merged into Torvalds’ tree on October 26, 2026, following Namjae Jeon’s October 24 submission. The in-kernel SMB3 file server gains extended directory queries and configurable per-connection session limits. The records retrieved October 29 establish a development-tree merge, not availability of Linux 7.4 as a stable release. 3 2 1
Directory-information classes specify the format of a directory-query response. KSMBD implements five additional classes, including FileIdExtdDirectoryInformation and FileIdAllExtdBothDirectoryInformation, with file attributes, reparse tags and initialized response padding. This expands the formats the server can answer for clients requesting them. The maintainer describes protocol support, not a measured improvement in directory-listing speed. 2
The new session cap is accounted for per connection: new sessions and multichannel bindings reserve slots, while failure and cleanup paths release them. That reservation-and-release mechanism supports enforcement of the configured limit. Operators can inspect the configured value through procfs, the kernel’s file-based inspection interface. However, the summary supplies neither the configuration key nor its default, procfs path or client-visible behavior when the cap is reached. 2
POSIX workflows receive more targeted changes. POSIX metadata queries must use POSIX opens, and the server checks negotiation and CREATE contexts for valid lengths, tags, duplicates, dialect and share eligibility. Requested creation modes, including zero, are applied; append-only writes are enforced and byte-range lock checks follow each open’s POSIX state. These are conditional changes to POSIX handling, rather than a blanket change to every SMB open. 2
For deployments using released ksmbd-tools, the maintainer reports restored share-configuration and Kerberos-authentication compatibility. Those two paths are therefore useful validation targets when evaluating a kernel containing this update: check that shares load and Kerberos logins work with the tools actually deployed. The summary does not identify the covered tools versions, so it is not a complete kernel-and-tools compatibility matrix. 2