While NFS is the canonical file protocol to mount remote file servers under Linux, BSDs and other Unix-like operating systems, SMB is the equivalent in the Windows world. Both NFS and SMB offer basically the same service: Remote access to files and directories. The Linux kernel has the ability to mount SMB shares from Samba and from Windows, but special Linux semantics is not properly covered. With the now deprecated SMB1 protocol there have been Unix extensions to make SMB1 a proper alternative to NFS.

For a couple of years now, work is going on to extend the current SMB3 protocol to make it a proper alternative to NFS with all semantics that Linux clients expect. This talk will present the current status and where we are with respect to SMB3 POSIX extensions.