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. The CIFS protocol is fully supported by
file servers such as Windows 2000 (including Windows 2003, Windows 2008,
NT 4 and Windows XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS
server support for Linux and many other operating systems). Limited
support for OS/2 and Windows ME and similar servers is provided as
well.

The module also provides optional support for the followon
protocols for CIFS including SMB3, which enables
useful performance and security features (see the description
of CONFIG_CIFS_SMB2).

The cifs module provides an advanced network file system
client for mounting to CIFS compliant servers. It includes
support for DFS (hierarchical name space), secure per-user
session establishment via Kerberos or NTLM or NTLMv2,
safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet
signing, Unicode and other internationalization improvements.
If you need to mount to Samba or Windows from this machine, say Y.

source code:

fs/cifs/