If you find yourself saying, "What's all this I've been hearing about Samba 4?", then Volker Lendecke's "Advances in Samba4" paper might be for you. The paper offers a nice overview of the reasoning behind creating Samba4, and outlines four areas of code where Samba4 is an improvement over Samba 3.

From "Advances in Samba4":

Samba 4 has been in development for about 18 months now. It is a complete start from scratch, hardly anything in the core Samba code is used commonly between Samba 3 and Samba 4. Why was this done?

Samba 3 shows its age. Essentially, it is still the very first implementation started by Andrew Tridgell more than a decade ago. Certainly it has seen a huge amount of improvement since that first implementation, but the internal structure has not really changed during its development.

The full paper is available here (in PDF format).

This paper was written for a talk Volker gave at Linuxkongress 2004, in Erlangen, Germany. Thanks to the conference for allowing the paper to be presented here.