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The recordings from sambaXP 2026 are now available. They bring together the talks from the 25th International User and Developer Conference for Samba, held in Göttingen on April 20 and 21, 2026. Watch the full playlist on YouTube:

This year’s conference offered a focused look at current work around Samba, SMB and the wider interoperability ecosystem. The talks cover Samba AD in real networks, SMB over QUIC, SMB-Direct, SMB3.1.1 client improvements, authentication and authorization, Winbind with Kerberos S4U2SELF, CTDB, VFS development, OpenRSAT, FreeIPA and Active Directory integration, and recent Samba AD security work.

Storage and performance were also strong themes, with sessions on Samba and Ceph, including SMB access to Ceph RGW, CephFS-backed SMB deployments, and SMB Multichannel in IBM Storage Scale.

Volker Lendecke’s keynote “25 years of sambaXP” set the frame for the conference. What started as a look back at 25 editions of sambaXP became a broader tour through major milestones in Samba’s history – from early SMB work to Samba 4 and the structures shaping the project today.

sambaXP 2026 was also closely connected with the SNIA SMB3 IO Lab EMEA. Hosted by SNIA with support from Microsoft, the IO Lab added a hands-on setting for SMB3 interoperability testing, protocol work and direct collaboration around real implementations. While sambaXP provided the public talks and discussions, the IO Lab continued that work in a dedicated test environment. That combination is central to sambaXP, where technical talks, direct exchange and practical interoperability meet in one place. It also reflects how Samba continues to develop.

sambaXP is organized by SerNet and has been a meeting point for the Samba Team, developers, users and vendors since 2002. The 2026 edition was made possible with the support of this years sponsors Microsoft, Tranquil IT, SerNet.

Samba’s release management is transitioning from Jule Anger to Björn Jacke. Both work at SerNet GmbH, which continues to sponsor the release manager role as part of its long-standing commitment to the Samba project.

A Role Central to the Project

Release management has always been a cornerstone of the Samba project. Stable maintenance branches, predictable release cycles, and timely security updates are essential to users and distributors alike. These responsibilities have traditionally been coordinated and communicated through the samba mailing lists, providing transparency and reliability for the wider community. In recent years, Jule Anger played a key role in carrying this work forward. She coordinated releases across multiple branches, supported security updates, and helped keep the release process structured and dependable. Jule remains connected to Samba as she transitions into a new role within SerNet’s verinice team.

With Björn Jacke stepping into the role, Samba’s release management remains in experienced hands. Björn is a long-time Samba maintainer and integrator who has been working with Samba for nearly its entire lifetime, integrating it into networks ranging from small setups to large-scale enterprise environments.

He has been closely involved in release-related workflows for many years and is a central contributor to SAMBA+ packaging. The transition therefore represents continuity rather than a change in direction.

Continued Support from SerNet

The change in personnel does not affect the underlying support structure. SerNet continues to sponsor the release manager role, ensuring that the time and focus required for this responsibility remain available. This support helps maintain regular releases, coordinated maintenance, and fast responses to security issues—benefiting the entire Samba community.

The Samba team at SerNet has reached another major milestone in the STA-funded development project: SMB Direct (RDMA) support is now taking shape in the Linux kernel. This marks a new stage for Samba – bringing high-speed, low-latency data transfer into the open-source world. With Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), data moves directly between client and server network adapters, bypassing the CPU and reducing latency. The result: enterprise-grade performance, available in an open, community-driven stack.

159 patches later

Developing SMB Direct required deep kernel integration. Over 159 patches, the Samba team unified existing SMB Direct components for both client and server, which paves the way toward a shared socket layer that can be exported to user space via socket API and then used by applications like Samba. This foundation enables future work on full SMB Direct support in smbd and smbclient, as well as automated testing and performance validation.

Several commits have already been merged into the main Linux kernel, with further work under active review: a milestone made possible through collaboration between Samba developers, kernel maintainers, and the wider Linux community.

Open performance, sovereign infrastructure 

SMB Direct is more than a technical upgrade. It’s a step toward digital sovereignty through performance and openness. By making advanced data-transfer capabilities available as free software, Samba enables secure, scalable file services without proprietary dependencies. The Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) supports this work as part of its mission to strengthen open digital infrastructure and Europe’s technological resilience.

With STA funding, Samba can focus on the kind of long-term, architectural development that benefits everyone from enterprises to public institutions.

Learn more about the full STA-funded Samba project and all milestones: https://samba.plus/stf-project

SerNet now offers a dedicated SAMBA+ Development SLA – tailored for organizations that want to commission specific Samba-related developments with a clearly defined start date.

Depending on the selected service level, development work begins within 10, 20 or 30 days. This provides planning certainty for customers who need timely implementation of features, integrations or performance improvements in:

• SAMBA+ or upstream Samba
• SMB protocol stacks
• Related technologies like AD, LDAP, DNS, DHCP, SSL, CUPS or Netatalk

The Development SLA complements our existing Support SLA and expands SerNet’s offering for customers with long-term engineering needs or custom development goals.

The full SLA terms, pricing, and ordering options are available in the SAMBA+ World Shop (EUR) and the SAMBA+ US Shop (USD). 

For more information, feel free to contact our sales team.

The Samba team at SerNet has completed another important milestone in the STF-funded development of the open-source Samba software: Milestone 3.3 focuses on improved integration with Linux desktop environments and is part of the broader SMB3 UNIX Extensions milestone group.

The goal of this work is to make Samba a more natural and consistent part of Unix-like operating systems. To achieve this, the team has extended libsmbclient, the client-side library used by major desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE to access SMB file shares. By enabling support for SMB3 POSIX extensions in this library, Samba now offers better handling of symbolic links, permissions, and metadata making file access on the desktop feel more like using a local Unix filesystem. The team also put in the work to provide the code needed for GNOME to enable the SMB3 Unix Extensions.

This milestone builds on earlier work within the SMB3 UNIX Extensions group: Milestone 3.1 focused on the server-side implementation of POSIX-compatible features. With Milestone 3.3, these improvements are now reaching Linux desktop environments and deliver the benefits of SMB3 UNIX Extensions directly to end users.

The achievement is part of the ongoing effort to enhance Samba’s security, scalability, and integration. The goal is to ensure that Samba remains a powerful, interoperable solution for sovereign IT environments and is funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency.