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by skissane 1388 days ago
What advantages does NFSv4 have over SMB/CIFS for this use case?

I have had the same idea myself before, but with a more cross-platform scope (Linux and Windows too, not just macOS). Whatever it flaws, SMB/CIFS has the advantage of being supported out-of-the-box on more platforms than NFSv4 is.
1 comments
chungy 1388 days ago
Are you sure about that?

Things that support SMB out of the box: Windows, Mac

Things that support NFSv4 out of the box: Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos

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skissane 1388 days ago
The Linux kernel contains both NFS and SMB clients – so in that sense, supports both equally "out of the box". Whether either or both are compiled-in (or available as loadable modules) will depend on the distribution.

Windows has an NFS client, but it is an additional OS feature which isn't installed by default (and I believe its NFS version support is somewhat outdated?)

Whether Linux distributions install the NFS and/or SMB client support by default, or require an additional package install for either or both, is really going to depend on the distribution (and its installation options)

FreeBSD, NetBSD and Illumos also include SMB client support, but I don't know how easy it is to use them as compared to their NFS clients. (From what I understand, OpenBSD pointedly has first-class support for NFS but not SMB: NFS has an in-kernel client, for SMB you have to use a user-space NFS-to-SMB translation daemon, which is in their ports tree.)

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chungy 1388 days ago
> Windows has an NFS client, but it is an additional OS feature which isn't installed by default (and I believe its NFS version support is somewhat outdated?)

Windows has both NFS server and client. It's not enabled by default, but it can be enabled. It has supported NFSv4 since Windows 8.

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DannyBee 1388 days ago
". It has supported NFSv4 since Windows 8."

Only as a server. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/nfs/...

It has never supported nfsv4 as a client.

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skissane 1388 days ago
Cool. So to update your list:

> Things that support SMB out of the box: Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumos

> Things that support NFSv4 out of the box: Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos

OpenBSD is the only real difference here. (And if "install something from ports" counts as "out of the box", there is no difference.)

There is still somewhat of a difference in ease-of-use though. For NFS, Windows users have to enable an OS feature which is not enabled by default. (I suppose one could automate that in the installer, run a PowerShell script for example.) Not sure how true that is for other platforms.

It still raises the question of why one might prefer NFSv4 vs SMB.

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