Lifecycle guide for Samba from Red Hat

All releases, patches, maintenance and support periods at a glance

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📅 Last update on 2026-01-20

What is Samba?

Automate product release and end-of-life management

Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol, and was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell. Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Microsoft Windows Server domain, either as a Domain Controller (DC) or as a domain member. As of version 4, it supports Active Directory and Microsoft Windows NT domains.

The entire lifecycle of Samba

The following figure shows you the visualised product life cycle of Samba. You can see all releases with the latest patch version, the long-term support characteristics (orange flag in the green circle, the periods for version provision, maintenance and support.

Samba (Red Hat) release, version and end-of-life information

Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product Samba (Red Hat)

What is the Samba release strategy?

The regular Samba release cycle intends a new release series: * six months fully supported, * another six months in the maintenance mode, * six months in the security fixes only mode. In total, each series is maintained for a period of approximately 18 months. **Example:** If 4.5 is the current release series, then 4.4 would be in maintenance mode and 4.3 would be in the security fixes only mode. The support of 4.2 would be stopped with the release of 4.5.0. Each series can have any number of desired minor releases. These are usually released every 6 weeks (current stable release series), resp. every 9 weeks (maintenance mode).