Merged back in Linux 5.15 in 2021 was KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 file server. There hasn't been much KSMBD news to report on recently but for Linux 7.2 there is now SMB2 compression support.

Linux developer Namjae Jeon took some time away from his new NTFS driver and F2FS driver efforts to work on this new compression support for KSMBDD. Microsoft SMB 3.1.1 introduced native in-transit data compression to accelerate file copying using algorithms like LZ4, XPRESS/LZ77, and Pattern_V1.

KSMBD has implemented this SMB 3.1.1 compression support and now shares the LZ77 encoder between CIFS and KSMBD. The KSMBD kernel driver is currently able to negotiate LZ77 and Pattern_V1 support and advertise the necessary SMB capabilities.

This merge landed the SMB compression support for both at rest data and over the wire. In addition, KSMBD has seen a number of bug fixes too for the Linux 7.2 kernel.