The patch to apply the current stable version of the CIFS VFS to the 2.4
kernel is available at
http://cvs.samba.org/samba/ftp/cifs-cvs/cifs24.87.patch The patch only
affects the usual small set of files outside its own directory (fs/cifs)
that a filesystem must change (e.g. fs/Config.in, fs/Makefile,
fs/Config.help) but does not require changes to any core kernel code.
Network filesystem interoperability with some of the newer servers,
including e.g. Windows 2003, requires features such as smb/cifs signing
which only the cifs vfs provides, so it is getting more important to add
the cifs vfs to 2.4 kernels when in heterogeneous environments.
The cifs filesystem is designed as a client network filesysetm for
remote access to Samba, newer Windows servers and also the many common
CIFS based NAS appliances, but unlike smbfs, the cifs vfs is optimized
for the current versions of the SMB/CIFS protocol and has better POSIX
file i/o semantics. The CIFS file system can coexist with smbfs. The
project web site has more information on the project
http://us1.samba.org/samba/Linux_CIFS_client.html
The filesystem has been in the 2.5 Linux Kernel for almost a year, and
is included in the the multiple 2.4 kernel distributions. The version
attached is the current version of the vfs module source for 2.4
(version 0.8.7) and matches the level of the code in the 2.5 kernel as
closely as possible.