Steve French, who for more than two decades maintained the CIFS/SMB client in the Linux kernel, died on August 22, 2026, days after a rapid decline in his health forced him to step away from maintaining the subsystem. His work let Linux natively access Windows file shares, Samba servers, NAS systems, and modern SMB-based services. Paulo Alcantara and Namjae Jeon have now taken over maintenance of code that remains part of millions of systems.
Steve French’s legacy in 30 seconds
- Steve French maintained the Linux kernel’s CIFS/SMB client for 24 years, used to access Windows shares, Samba, and numerous NAS devices.
- He submitted the CIFS client for inclusion in Linux 2.5 in October 2002.
- Paulo Alcantara becomes the primary maintainer, with Namjae Jeon as secondary maintainer.
- Linus Torvalds merged the maintainer change on August 21.
- The Samba project confirmed French’s death a day later, on August 22, 2026.
His name may be unfamiliar even to administrators who have worked with Linux for years. His code, however, sits behind an extremely common operation.
When an administrator runs something like:
mount -t cifs //fileserver/data /mnt/data -o credentials=/etc/cifs.credLinux needs to speak SMB with the remote server. For nearly a quarter century, Steve French was behind the development and maintenance of an essential part of that path.
On August 18, 2026, Paulo Alcantara sent a small patch to the kernel mailing lists. The change didn’t modify the CIFS implementation or fix any bug. It updated the MAINTAINERS file.
The subject explained exactly what was happening:
MAINTAINERS: Replace Steve French as CIFS maintainerAlcantara explained that French could no longer continue due to health problems and announced that he would take over primary responsibility, with Namjae Jeon as secondary maintainer.
The change also moved the development repository used to prepare upcoming patches. Until then it pointed to a directory associated with French on Samba’s infrastructure; from that point on it moved to the repository maintained by Alcantara.
Linus Torvalds merged the change on August 21 as part of the Linux 7.3 development cycle.
A day later, the Samba project shared much harder news: Steve French had died.
From IBM to Linux’s CIFS client
The story of the kernel’s modern CIFS client goes back to the start of this century.
On October 8, 2002, French, then a senior engineer at IBM’s Linux Technology Center in Austin, announced on the kernel mailing list that the CIFS client was ready to be merged into Linux 2.5.
The goal was to provide remote access to Samba servers, modern versions of Windows, and the many NAS devices that already used CIFS.
CIFS, Common Internet File System, is closely related to Server Message Block (SMB), the protocol historically used by Windows to share files and other resources over a network. Today’s versions of the protocol are known mainly as SMB2 and SMB3.
For a Linux server, Samba can play the other side of that communication and offer resources to Windows clients and other systems.
The kernel client performs the reverse function.
When Linux needs to mount a share hosted on another server over SMB, the corresponding module builds the requests, negotiates the connection’s characteristics, and lets that remote storage be presented to the system as a filesystem.
French devoted a large part of his career to this interoperability.
His relationship with Samba had actually started even before he proposed the client for the kernel. His first commit to the project is dated November 2001.
CIFS, Samba, and ksmbd aren’t the same thing
French’s career also helps clear up a fairly common mix-up between Samba and the SMB support built into the kernel.
Samba is a much broader project that runs mainly in user space. Its historical components include services for sharing files, integrating identities from Windows domains, and providing other functions related to SMB and Active Directory.
The kernel has different pieces.
cifs.ko acts as an SMB client. It lets Linux access information stored on a remote server.
ksmbd, on the other hand, is an in-kernel SMB server implementation. It lets a Linux system itself handle SMB requests.
Both also share common components within the kernel’s source tree.
French authored and maintained the Linux client and also took part in maintaining ksmbd. Drawing on a presentation the developer himself gave in April 2026, the client stood at around 67,000 lines of code at that point.
Nor was it a frozen part of the kernel.
According to data French gathered for that presentation, during the year ending April 2026 the CIFS client received 582 changes, compared with 303 for NFS. The comparison shows just how active a subsystem started more than two decades earlier still was.
SMB has changed considerably over that period. Support for modern versions of the protocol has added security improvements, multichannel, encryption, performance over fast networks, and numerous changes related to remote storage.
Maintenance work meant precisely making sure that evolution kept working inside Linux.
From IBM to Microsoft without giving up Linux maintenance
French’s career also has an interesting quirk.
He began developing the CIFS client while working at IBM and joined Microsoft in 2018.
Changing employers didn’t mean giving up his responsibility for Linux.
French kept maintaining the CIFS/SMB client while working on the team related to Azure Storage. That meant he was involved both in Microsoft’s storage technologies and in the open-source code that lets Linux communicate with SMB-based services.
In an interview published by Rice University in 2019, he explained the scale that work had reached. He noted that the filesystem he maintained had been the third most active in Linux over the previous year, and pointed out that millions of users depend on these networking, storage, and file-sharing technologies.
Interoperability between Linux and the Windows world stopped being a concern limited to traditional corporate networks a long time ago.
SMB shows up in NAS devices, enterprise storage, and cloud services. Linux, for its part, is present in servers, containers, virtual machines, and public cloud platforms.
The client French started developing in the early days of Linux 2.5 had to evolve alongside all of them.
Paulo Alcantara and Namjae Jeon take over
Maintenance of the subsystem now rests mainly with Paulo Alcantara and Namjae Jeon.
They aren’t newcomers.
Alcantara was already listed as a reviewer for the subsystem and has spent years working on this code. His areas include Distributed File System (DFS), used within SMB to build distributed namespaces and redirect clients to different resources.
Jeon also has a long track record within the kernel.
He has worked on filesystems and was one of the main people behind ksmbd, the SMB server built into Linux. He has also worked on exFAT and NTFS.
The maintenance transition, then, goes to developers who know the code and have spent years working in the same areas.
That matters especially in Linux.
A maintainer doesn’t just write code. They review changes submitted by other developers, decide which patches are ready enough, coordinate fixes, keep development branches, and act as the link between contributors and the people who merge changes into the kernel.
French’s last presentation at SambaXP, held in April 2026, reflects exactly that collective dimension.
Across its 44 slides he repeatedly credited other developers’ work and devoted space to improvements still in progress. According to the source material, his final slide ended with four words:
“Future is very bright!”
Four months later, the Samba project confirmed his death with a message recalling both his dedication to the SMB community and the respectful way he had helped and encouraged other developers.
The handover also leaves a fairly representative picture of how Linux works.
A few-line patch can change who’s listed in MAINTAINERS, but it doesn’t suddenly replace 24 years of work. The code stays in the kernel, the new maintainers keep developing it, and thousands of servers will keep mounting SMB shares without their administrators ever needing to know who originally wrote much of that infrastructure.
Steve French’s legacy is right there: in a piece of Linux that, for many administrators, is so routine it usually goes unnoticed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Steve French in Linux?
Steve French was the main author and, for more than two decades, the maintainer of the Linux kernel’s CIFS/SMB client. His work lets Linux systems access SMB shares on Windows servers, Samba, NAS devices, and other compatible platforms.
Who now maintains CIFS and SMB3 in Linux?
Paulo Alcantara took over as primary maintainer, with Namjae Jeon as secondary maintainer, after Steve French stepped down for health reasons in August 2026.
What’s the difference between Samba, cifs.ko, and ksmbd?
Samba is a set of mainly user-space software that provides SMB services and other interoperability functions. cifs.ko is the kernel client used to access SMB servers, while ksmbd lets Linux act as an SMB server from within the kernel.
When did the CIFS client enter Linux?
Steve French announced in October 2002 that the CIFS client was ready to be merged into the Linux 2.5 kernel. Since then, the code has evolved to support modern versions of SMB and new storage and networking features.
