fvdw-sl on WD My Cloud

[fvdw]

Oke thank you, so with using kernel 3.2 higher transfer rates are possible according your tests.
My writing speed is on samba 15 MB/s , while reading is around 60MB/s
Maybe it has to do with fact that we use ext4 format.

PS kernel 3.2 cannot use smb2 or 3 as kernel has no support for it.
I found an email addres of the person that posted about kernel 3.19 on wd forum. I have sent him an email asking for suport.

[fvdw]

:) I did not forget you, I have been busy trying to compile kernel 3.19 for wdcloud. The kernel runs but there is still an issue with network interface driver. Very slow transfer (Kb/s). Think this will be a problem not easy to solve. For the moment we are stuck with kernel 3.2 and we should work on adding missing features. Also I am busy with some home improvement jobs so limited time for firmware development. I trust you understand :)

[matt_max]

No problem :thumbup I found that other chipsets used by WD are also problematic. This guy try to use kernel 5.x with SOC LS1024A chip. And he has a problem with a network module too.

[matt_max]

Hi @fvdw. Any news from gen1 guy?

[fvdw]

Hi matt_max I got some patches and it made ethernet card work but performance is terrible. I want able yet to find the reason For the moment we are stuck to the old WD kernel. Which lacks samba 2-3 support

[matt_max]

What a pity :( I can do some more tests if you wish.
Maybe you can build new module for bcm54612e? AFAIK the same chip is sometimes used in routers - such as Netgear RAX80 (Nighthawk AX8). I found that Netgear share some open source code for this kind of devices. Maybe this one will be helpful. I wasn't able to find Openwrt for this exact router but who knows :dontknow

[fvdw]

Thx for these tips. I think that the Broadcom phy driver isn't the problem. It seems more the pfe (packet forwarding engine) communicating with the standard kernel. This mainboard uses this pfe module between cu and the broadcom ethernet chip.
The code of the pfe module is very complex. Apperently some changes are made in the kernel code by WD to make this pfe module work properly. As differences berween a 3.2 and 3.19 kernel are substantial it is not a simple copy paste of patches that are used in 3.2 kernel into 3.19 kernel.

[Mijzelf]

For the moment we are stuck to the old WD kernel. Which lacks samba 2-3 support

What do you mean? Samba is user space, and AFAIK it doesn't have any kernel constraints, it just relies on libc. I have run Samba 3.6.25 on a 2.6.31 kernel, without problems. According to Wikipedia that has SMB2 support.
Or are you talking about ksmbd?

[fvdw]

Well to my knowledge support for smb2 protocol was added in kernel 3.7 and smb3 protocol was only added in kernel 3.12. Newer samba version can run on older kernel but cannot use smb3 protocol. Or am I wrong :scratch See here https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/SMB3_kernel_status and here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
Note, Smb3 was in past known as 2.2.

I know that there are backports available that could enable using smb3 protocol on older kernels. I never tried them.

We have seen good speed increase using smb3 with kernels 4.x but if this is also the case with older kernels is a question mark. For wd mycloud gen1 the idea was to see if newer samba version and protocols would increase transfer speed as we have seen on kirkwood based nas devices. However this comcerto cpu requires a lot of patches in the kernel, especially. to get this pfe module working properly. The newer kernel runs but the pfe module is not working properly.

Besides that it seems that WD also saw the performance issue and introduced a kernel using 64k pages to improve transfer speeds. Unfortunate our firmware doesn't work with such a kernel.Maybe this 64k based kernel is much more effectuve to improve transfer speeds than the smb protocol.

[Mijzelf]

See here

That is about the cifs kernel module, which implements the client filesystem driver. (Needed for 'mount -t cifs //server/share /mountpoint). There is also a server kenel module, ksmbd, but the package which is called 'samba' or 'samba-server' on most distro's uses neither of them, and is pure user space software.

Besides that it seems that WD also saw the performance issue and introduced a kernel using 64k pages to improve transfer speeds. Unfortunate our firmware doesn't work with such a kernel.Maybe this 64k based kernel is much more effectuve to improve transfer speeds than the smb protocol.

I doubt that is was used to speed up Samba. The ZyXEL NAS540 originally also used 64k pages, but when they changed that to 4k the samba speed only slightly increased.
I think the main reason that ZyXEL originally used 64k pages was the filesystem size. Ext3 can only have 2^32 clusters, and a cluster has to fit in a page. (Don't know why exactly). And while for ext4 the number of clusters can be bigger, that was not yet the case for the stock kernel. And so with 4k pages the filesystem size was limited to 16TiB (-4k), which can be restricting for a 4 bay NAS. With 64k pages the filesystem size could be 256TiB.
Maybe WD used 64k for the same reason. AFAIK there is a 2 disk version of the My Cloud, which could exceed the 16TiB limit with two >8TB disks in raid0.

(BTW, the use of a sector size >4k made the volumes hard to mount on other boxes. The ext3/4 kernel driver doesn't accept that. But there is a work-around, there exists an ext3 fuse implementation (for BSD and Mac, I suppose) which doesn't care about page size.)