"Samba accelerator" in new Asus routers?

[RMerlin]

According to a marketing video from Asus, the new Broadcom platform includes a "Samba accelerator", which is supposed to explain the performance boost in their recent routers.

Personally, the benchmark results look more like the type of performance gain one would expect from the 40% CPU clock increase, and the only Samba-related optimization I see in the firmware code is Broadcom's custom file splice support that's patched on top of the Kernel and the Samba sources. There is one specially optimized Samba build that is being developed by Tuxera (providers of the NTFS kernel driver), however it isn't used by Asus (at least at this point).

Broadcom's own marketing material provides nothing more on this.

Anyone's thoughts on this?

 

[charlie2alpha]

Marketing fubar? Personally I don't even use my router as NAS, I have a separate PC for that but the target audience is the average Joe I suppose. And the average Joe doesn't know about kernels, Tuxera, or even NTFS. Just like that WTFast service which sounds totally like snakeoil.

 

[kvic]

only Samba-related optimization I see in the firmware code is Broadcom's custom file splice support that's patched on top of the Kernel and the Samba sources. There is one specially optimized Samba build that is being developed by Tuxera (providers of the NTFS kernel driver), however it isn't used by Asus (at least at this point).

One feature that broadcom lists under BCM47094 is

• USB3.0, offering >100MB/s Data rates

That alone will boost Samba performance.

I thought samba accelerator was referring to that in a generic sense. But since you found some code traces, then perhaps there is additional software optimisation to it. It could e.g. maintain sustained throughput under load, serve more Samba users simultaneously without losing much total throughput, reduce CPU utilisation under any workload...

Just some guess. As I originally thought "samba accelerator" means >100MByte/s over USB 3.0.

Good news for consumers when such feature twiddle down to mainstream routers. Going to kill off entry-level NAS...

 

[RMerlin]

Makes no sense calling it "Samba accelerator" if it's just the generic USB performance improvements, because that would also accelerate FTP performance, among other things.

It just struck me as odd when he specifically referred to it as "Samba accelerator" more than once in his presentation.

And I think that splice code was also added to the previous models a few months ago, so it's not anything new specific to the new models.

 

[VANT]

Some time after the Asus release 87u, he told us that soon increase USB performace about 20%. Maybe this is samba accelerator

 

[RMerlin]

Some time after the Asus release 87u, he told us that soon increase USB performace about 20%. Maybe this is samba accelerator

Back then, that was due to improvements in Broadcom's SDK7 that they were planning on using for the RT-AC87U. I even had a very early alpha build of it, and it did improve USB performance greatly. They had to scrap their plans to migrate to SDK7 however, as it wasn't fully supported by the bcm4360, and also it was missing some features from SDK6.

You can see that benefit with the RT-AC3200, which runs SDK7.

 

[sfx2000]

I thought samba accelerator was referring to that in a generic sense. But since you found some code traces, then perhaps there is additional software optimisation to it. It could e.g. maintain sustained throughput under load, serve more Samba users simultaneously without losing much total throughput, reduce CPU utilisation under any workload...

Just some guess. As I originally thought "samba accelerator" means >100MByte/s over USB 3.0.

If they're touching samba, then it should be fairly easy to back trace the changes made, as Samba is GPLv3... so whether Asus or Broadcom directly made the changes...

 

[RMerlin]

If they're touching samba, then it should be fairly easy to back trace the changes made, as Samba is GPLv3... so whether Asus or Broadcom directly made the changes...

The Samba changes are all there, you can see them in one of my recent GPL merges. My firmware does not use them however, as I was unable to port their 3.0.25b patches on top of the 3.6 that I use.