| rjw | 1f88458 | 2022-01-06 17:20:42 +0800 | [diff] [blame^] | 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 |
| 13 | servers. |
| 14 | |
| 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. |
| 26 | |
| 27 | This filesystem has an mount utility (mount.cifs) that can be obtained from |
| 28 | |
| 29 | https://ftp.samba.org/pub/linux-cifs/cifs-utils/ |
| 30 | |
| 31 | It must be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | For more information on the module see the project wiki page at |
| 34 | |
| 35 | https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils |