Samba 4.12 Bringing Much Faster Encryption Performance With GnuTLS

Samba 4.11 was just released a few weeks back with big scalability improvements, but looking ahead to Samba 4.12 will be some big performance improvements for those leveraging encryption.

Samba 4.12 for SMB3 file transfers with encryption will be an order of 4~6 times faster than current performance levels! This is coming as Samba is beginning to properly leverage GnuTLS rather than historically implementing its own crypto methods.

Tapping GnuTLS also means being able to exploit hardware acceleration now for the prominent ciphers and that is making a big difference over Samba's old crypto code. Samba with AES-GCM from GNuTLS can be twice as fast for transferring files as their previous implementation.

More details on the Samba + GnuTLS performance wins via this blog post by developer Andreas Schneider.