Steve French Steps Down as CIFS/SMB3 Maintainer in the Linux Kernel

The Linux kernel is seeing a changing of the guard: starting with version 7.3, the CIFS (Common Internet File System) / SMB3 code will have new maintainers. Steve French, the long-standing maintainer and lead author of the CIFS implementation for Linux, is stepping down from the role for health reasons — the specific causes have not been disclosed.

More than two decades of work

French was there at the very beginning of Microsoft protocol support in the kernel: upstream development of the CIFS VFS client under his leadership began back in 2002. For a long time he worked as an engineer at IBM, and since 2018 he has been at Microsoft working on Azure Storage, all while continuing to maintain the CIFS code in the kernel. In recent years his area of responsibility also came to include KSMBD — a relatively new implementation of an SMB server directly inside the kernel. French is also a member of the Samba project team.

Who will pick up the baton

The corresponding patch has already been accepted into the tree. The duties of CIFS/SMB3 maintainer will now be shared by two people — Paulo Alcantara and Namjae Jeon. Co-maintainership looks like a sensible solution given the volume of code and its importance: support for the SMB family of protocols is critical for Linux systems to interoperate with Windows network shares and a great many NAS devices.

The departure of a developer who has devoted more than twenty years to a single subsystem is a notable event for the community. We can only wish Steve French a speedy recovery, and the new maintainers success in keeping up the pace of development that CIFS and KSMBD have built over these years.

Source: Phoronix