On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 10:23 AM Alexandre Jardon via Dev <dev@ceph.io> wrote:
There is a point on the monday agenda of the Steering Committee to see what will be the ceph posture on this Subject
I have a scheduling conflict for that meeting, but I did some research which should be discussed in that call: There are three options to fix this: 1. Fix and improve the existing DOKAN-based driver 2. Implement a new RDBSS-based filesystem driver. This is what SMB, CIFS, RDP, WebDAV, NFSv3, NFSv4.1, BeeFS, VirtualBox SharedFolder drivers do 3. Implement a "raw" Windows driver without the aid of RDBSS. This is what OpenAFS is doing [1] is limited by the features of the Windows DOKAN kernel driver, which excludes Windows ACLs, sparse files Cygwin/MSYS2 support, and a purely synchronous interface. DOKAN and DOKAN-Y also saw almost zero development in the last couple of years. Advantages: It would be a minimum effort to do fixes there. [2] is the most common option for Windows network filesystems, as RDBSS is the kernel utility library for that. But the knowledge of writing a RDBSS driver is mostly limited to Microsoft staff, with the only exceptions being the VirtualBox Shared Folder driver, and the opensource Windows NFSv4.2 driver ms-nfs41-client. Advantages: RDBSS includes support for async IO, ACLs, use of local files as offline cache, sparse file support, Windows EA and Windows named stream support, Cygwin/MSYS2 support. This is a full time job, and requires hiring. [3] would be the most flexible option, because it can do anything a local filesystem driver can do, but likely the most expensive one, as no utility library is involved. All has to be done, and tested, from scratch. Maybe hire one of the OpenAFS guys to do that work. Will also be a full time job. Finally, a solution must be found to get the Windows drivers resulting from [1], [2], or [3] signed with a Secureboot certificate, otherwise the new and improved Ceph Windows driver can only be used with Secureboot disabled, which does not sit well with any enterprise IT setup. Thanks, Martin