SMBNFS

SMBNFS is a term used to describe a conceptual interoperability layer or project intended to enable access to SMB and NFS file shares within a single environment. It may refer to an experimental protocol, gateway, or translator that allows SMB clients to access NFS exports or for NFS clients to access SMB shares, thereby bridging the dominant Windows and Unix/Linux file-sharing ecosystems.

As a concept, SMBNFS has no widely adopted standard. Implementations would vary, but common approaches include deploying a gateway or proxy that translates SMB protocol requests to NFS operations and vice versa, or integrating SMB servers with NFS export support in a single storage stack. Such solutions aim to reduce data-mobility friction in mixed networks, simplify migrations, and support unified access control.

Security considerations include authentication compatibility (Kerberos, NTLM, or other), authorization policy translation, and careful mapping of file permissions and ACLs between POSIX and Windows schemas. Translation layers must preserve metadata integrity and handle locking semantics across protocols. Performance can be affected by translation overhead and cache coherence.

Limitations include potential loss of protocol-specific features, partial support for advanced file attributes, and risk of inconsistent behavior across corners of the file system semantics. Because SMB and NFS were designed with different goals, achieving complete parity is challenging, and deployments must test compatibility with client applications and workloads.

As of this writing, SMBNFS is not an official standard and has no widely adopted implementation.