There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons.

Longtime Linux CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 developer and Samba team member is sadly stepping away from his kernel maintainer role due to unspecified health reasons. Steve French was a longtime IBM engineer while since 2018 is employed by Microsoft working on Azure Storage and continued there as the upstream maintainer of the CIFS kernel code as well as [1]KSMBD more recently as that newer in-kernel SMB server implementation. French has been contributing to the Linux kernel since 2002 when upstreaming began on the CIFS VFS client.

With the now merged [2]patch , Steve French has stepped down as maintainer with Paulo Alcantara and Namjae Jeon stepping in as the new co-maintainers for CIFS/SMB3.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/KSMBD

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=614b9fb585f143d65162f17f1a4b4ec4cbdf5794