1 This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well
2 older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS)
3 protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block
4 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
5 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now
6 called SMB2 and SMB3. These dialects are also supported by the
7 CIFS VFS module. CIFS is fully supported by network
8 file servers such as Windows 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012 and 2016
9 as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS
10 server support for Linux and many other operating systems), Apple
11 systems, as well as most Network Attached Storage vendors, so
12 this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of
15 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
16 file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced
17 security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better
18 POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption,
19 high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet
20 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
21 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support
22 the CIFS Unix extensions (and in the future SMB3 POSIX extensions),
23 the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and
24 cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
25 not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments.
27 This filesystem has an mount utility (mount.cifs) that can be obtained from
29 https://ftp.samba.org/pub/linux-cifs/cifs-utils/
31 It must be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.
33 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at
35 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils
git.samba.org / sfrench / cifs-2.6.git / blob