Documentation 

• Installation 
• Todo/Bug list 
• SNIA CIFS Specification 
• Authors/Thanks 
• CIFS VFS Paper 
• Linux Network Filesystems Paper 

• Latest 2.4 Release (gz containing cifs vfs source files and patch for kernel makefile and configure) 
• Version 0.8.2 of cifs vfs (Prebuilt binary for 2.4.21 kernel) 
• For Linux 2.6 the cifs vfs does not require a distinct download (it is in starting in kernel release 2.5.42). Kernel version 2.6.0-test3 contains version 0.8.7 of the cifs vfs. The current version is always available via the bitkeeper tree at http://cifs.bkbits.net/linux-2.5cifs
• Prebuilt mount helper utility (/sbin/mount.cifs) built for i386
• Source for cifs mount utility on sambaweb
• man page for mount utility (Note: syntax is slightly ahead of the code)  
• CIFS Files via CVS Web 
• Via CVS 

cvs -z5 -d 
:pserver:cvs@pserver.samba.org:/cvsroot
co cifsvfs

• Most current 2.5 source at cifs.bkbits.net (requires installation of BitKeeper)

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 CIFS by default.   The CIFS VFS does not provide support for older servers based on the more primitive SMB (Server Message Block) protocol (you can use the Linux filesystem smbfs for these).   CIFS VFS is designed to take advantage of advanced network filesystem features such as locking, Unicode (advanced internationalization), hardlinks, dfs (heirarchical, replicated name space), distributed caching and uses native TCP names (rather than RFC1001, Netbios names).  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 upcoming improvements to the mount helper (mount.cifs) 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.   The CIFS VFS has been tested with Linux 2.4.6 and later as well as regular testing on Linux 2.5 (and is in the kernel source starting with Linux kernel 2.5.42. Testing has been done on various hardware architectures including x86 and even big endian zSeries hardware.   The cifs and smbfs filesystems can coexist on the same system and do not conflict.
 

The current 2.4 version of the CIFS VFS is 0.8.7 which was released on August 5th , 2003 and the current 2.6.0-test3 Linux version of the cifs vfs is version 0.8.7 (0.8.8 is available from cifs.bkbits.net/linux-2.5cifs bitkeeper tree).

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