This is the client VFS module for the Common Internet File System
    (CIFS) protocol which is the successor to the Server Message Block 
    (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early

    PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now
    called SMB2 and SMB3. These dialects are also supported by the
    CIFS VFS module. CIFS is fully supported by network
    file servers such as Windows 2000, 2003, 2008 and 2012
    as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS

    server support for Linux and many other operating systems), so
    this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of

    servers.

  
    The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
    file system function for CIFS compliant servers, including better
    POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, high
    performance safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet
    signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
    improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support
    the CIFS Unix extensions, the combination can provide a reasonable 
    alternative to NFSv4 for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
    not just in Linux to Windows environments.

    This filesystem has an mount utility (mount.cifs) that can be obtained from

        https://ftp.samba.org/pub/linux-cifs/cifs-utils/

    It must be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.

    For more information on the module see the project wiki page at

        https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils