CIFS VFS - 

Advanced Common Internet File System for Linux 

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The CIFS VFS is a virtual file system for Linux to allow access to servers and storage appliances compliant with the SNIA CIFS Specification version 1.0 or later.    Popular servers such as Samba, Windows 2000, Windows XP and many others support this.   For older servers based on the more primitive SMB (Server Message Block) protocol, smbfs provides support for Linux.   CIFS VFS is designed to take advantage of advanced network filesystem features such as locking, hardlinks, dfs (heirarchical, replicated name space), distributed caching and uses native TCP or RFC1001.  Unlike some other network filesystems all key network function including authentication is provided in kernel (and changes to mount and/or a mount helper file are not required in order to enable the CIFS VFS). With the addition of a future mount helper the CIFS VFS will be able to take advantage of the new CIFS URL specification though.   The Todo list includes some of the other features being planned for future releases.   Currently the CIFS VFS has been tested with Linux 2.4.6 and later and testing has been done on Linux 2.5
 

The current version of the CIFS VFS is 0.3. It was released on May 19th, 2002. 

CIFS VFS is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. 

Thanks to the Samba Team