Express Logic Announces Availability of Network File Sharing Software for ThreadX

CIFS is a network protocol designed to share files between systems over a network. There are typically two types of systems involved in this file sharing, clients and servers. Clients access files that are stored on a server. Many systems operate as both a client and a server which is the case with most desktop systems in use today. These desktop systems can both access files on a file server, but system admin and other users can also access files on shared folders on the desktop machine. With Blue Peach's Blue Share™ software, ThreadX™-based systems can participate in this same network of file-sharing nodes of desktops and file servers.



ThreadX is Express Logic’s royalty-free, full source code RTOS that is deployed in over 800 million consumer electronics, medical, and industrial automation devices. CIFS allows the sharing of directories, files, printers and other types of objects represented using file semantics over a network. CIFS also provide mechanisms for discovering servers, browsing for shares, listing of files, authenticating access, and securing communications.

Network file sharing provides many benefits and CIFS is the most widely deployed and most cross platform friendly of all available file sharing protocols. Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Network File Sharing are closely related since all NAS devices use some form of protocol to access files. Most NAS devices today use CIFS. Embedded devices, enabled with CIFS, are able to access files on most NAS devices on the market.



The benefits of Network File Sharing are intuitive but in an embedded space, there are unique capabilities that become possible once the device is able to share files over a network:



• no need for hard disk storage or large flash storage which can reduce costs

• storage can be used more efficiently and shared among many devices, alleviating costs

• devices can share state and files reducing the need for complicated synchronization mechanisms.

• loadable executables allowing for software upgrades without downloads and flash updates

• centralized backup of important state information

• use of high availability and data integrity features of RAID-based storage



CIFS layers additional benefits over basic Network File Sharing:

• advanced communications semantics allowing communications through pipes or FIFOs

• shared locking of files insuring data integrity across multiple clients

• ability for sophisticated caching algorithms allowing for increased scalability of applications

• fault tolerance and high availability through fail-over and resilient network connections

• advanced security providing secure authentication, and file and directory security policies

• high-performance implementations

• unicode file names allowing for non-English and Western European languages.

• global file name space. Users need not be aware of the network nature of the files and all accesses occur transparently over the network.



CIFS needs little from a host RTOS or operating system. Blue Share provides all layered functions needed with the exception of a TCP/IP networking stack and basic operating system fundamentals such as threads, and related synchronization mechanisms, which are now available from ThreadX, NetX and FileX. Secure Authentication requires a cryptographic stack like openssl and a CIFS server requires underlying host file system support.