LinuxCIFS: Difference between revisions

From SambaWiki
No edit summary
Line 13: Line 13:
Here's a list of projects that need to be done
Here's a list of projects that need to be done


* Large Scale Projects:
* Asynchronous reads and writes: allow a single task to have more than one read or write outstanding at a time
** Asynchronous reads and writes: allow a single task to have more than one read or write outstanding at a time
* Better management for open filehandles: move to a real refcounted scheme where last user of a filehandle does the on the wire close
** Better management for open filehandles: move to a real refcounted scheme where last user of a filehandle does the on the wire close
* Support for storing NTLMv2 hashes in keyring: implement an "ntlminit" program and teach CIFS how to pull those hashes out of the keyring
* MultiSession Mounts: [[ LinuxCIFS_MultisessionMount ]]
** MultiSession Mounts: [[ LinuxCIFS_MultisessionMount ]]

* Clean up cifs manpages: move most of the current info from mount.cifs manpage to a new cifs(5) manpage and flesh it out

* Medium Scale Projects
** Support for storing NTLMv2 hashes in keyring: implement an "ntlminit" program and teach CIFS how to pull those hashes out of the keyring

* Simple Projects
** Clean up cifs manpages: move most of the current info from mount.cifs manpage to a new cifs(5) manpage and flesh it out

Revision as of 16:03, 28 August 2009

Introduction

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 provides some support for older servers based on the more primitive SMB (Server Message Block) protocol (you also can use the Linux file system smbfs as an alternative for accessing these). CIFS VFS is designed to take advantage of advanced network file system features such as locking, Unicode (advanced internationalization), hardlinks, dfs (hierarchical, replicated name space), distributed caching and uses native TCP names (rather than RFC1001, Netbios names). Unlike some other network file systems 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).

The CIFS VFS was added to mainline Linux kernels in 2.5.42. While only peripherally related to SAMBA, the cifs client userspace tools live within the samba source tree.

Mailing List

Discussion of the Linux CIFS Client takes place primarily on the linux-cifs-client mailing list:

To Do List

Here's a list of projects that need to be done

  • Large Scale Projects:
    • Asynchronous reads and writes: allow a single task to have more than one read or write outstanding at a time
    • Better management for open filehandles: move to a real refcounted scheme where last user of a filehandle does the on the wire close
    • MultiSession Mounts: LinuxCIFS_MultisessionMount


  • Medium Scale Projects
    • Support for storing NTLMv2 hashes in keyring: implement an "ntlminit" program and teach CIFS how to pull those hashes out of the keyring
  • Simple Projects
    • Clean up cifs manpages: move most of the current info from mount.cifs manpage to a new cifs(5) manpage and flesh it out