xref: /OK3568_Linux_fs/kernel/Documentation/admin-guide/cifs/introduction.rst (revision 4882a59341e53eb6f0b4789bf948001014eff981)
1*4882a593Smuzhiyun============
2*4882a593SmuzhiyunIntroduction
3*4882a593Smuzhiyun============
4*4882a593Smuzhiyun
5*4882a593Smuzhiyun  This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well
6*4882a593Smuzhiyun  as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS)
7*4882a593Smuzhiyun  protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block
8*4882a593Smuzhiyun  (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
9*4882a593Smuzhiyun  PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now
10*4882a593Smuzhiyun  called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.1)
11*4882a593Smuzhiyun  is strongly preferred over using older dialects like CIFS due to
12*4882a593Smuzhiyun  security reaasons. All modern dialects, including the most recent,
13*4882a593Smuzhiyun  SMB3.1.1 are supported by the CIFS VFS module. The SMB3 protocol
14*4882a593Smuzhiyun  is implemented and supported by all major file servers
15*4882a593Smuzhiyun  such as all modern versions of Windows (including Windows 2016
16*4882a593Smuzhiyun  Server), as well as by Samba (which provides excellent
17*4882a593Smuzhiyun  CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server support and tools for Linux and many other
18*4882a593Smuzhiyun  operating systems).  Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as
19*4882a593Smuzhiyun  do most Network Attached Storage vendors, so this network
20*4882a593Smuzhiyun  filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of systems.
21*4882a593Smuzhiyun  It also supports mounting to the cloud (for example
22*4882a593Smuzhiyun  Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security features.
23*4882a593Smuzhiyun
24*4882a593Smuzhiyun  The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
25*4882a593Smuzhiyun  file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced
26*4882a593Smuzhiyun  security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better
27*4882a593Smuzhiyun  POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption,
28*4882a593Smuzhiyun  high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet
29*4882a593Smuzhiyun  signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
30*4882a593Smuzhiyun  improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support
31*4882a593Smuzhiyun  the CIFS Unix extensions (and in the future SMB3 POSIX extensions),
32*4882a593Smuzhiyun  the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and
33*4882a593Smuzhiyun  cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
34*4882a593Smuzhiyun  not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments.
35*4882a593Smuzhiyun
36*4882a593Smuzhiyun  This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space
37*4882a593Smuzhiyun  tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from
38*4882a593Smuzhiyun
39*4882a593Smuzhiyun      https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git
40*4882a593Smuzhiyun
41*4882a593Smuzhiyun  or
42*4882a593Smuzhiyun
43*4882a593Smuzhiyun      git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git
44*4882a593Smuzhiyun
45*4882a593Smuzhiyun  mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.
46*4882a593Smuzhiyun
47*4882a593Smuzhiyun  For more information on the module see the project wiki page at
48*4882a593Smuzhiyun
49*4882a593Smuzhiyun      https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS
50*4882a593Smuzhiyun
51*4882a593Smuzhiyun  and
52*4882a593Smuzhiyun
53*4882a593Smuzhiyun      https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils
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