CentOS 8.2: Previous versions of SoftNAS used CentOS 6, which has reached end of support. Thus, CVE and other fixes to CentOS 6 are no longer being provided. CentOS 8.2 is supported and provides the ability to obtain CentOS updates and patches allowing for better support of your SoftNAS environment.
New kernel and Samba: Moving to CentOS 6 also allowed us to use new versions of the kernel and Samba. As a result of the newer components, and a few other modifications we made, we are seeing measurable performance gains in SoftNAS 5. In certain scenarios with the new Samba, we have seen a specific benchmark that achieved a 60% gain in performance. While you may not see this level of improvement for every scenario, we do see measurable improvements across the board in our SoftNAS 4 vs SoftNAS 5 benchmarks.
Also note that moving to SoftNAS 5 now will help ensure that you are still within the Buurst End of Support policies. The official End of Support for SoftNAS 4, by policy, is scheduled for January 2022.