Support Is Being Worked On For Root File-System Support Over SMB Protocol

A Phoronix reader pointed out recent patches by a SUSE engineer working on support for mounting root file-systems over SMB (Samba).

The proposed patches by Paulo Alcantara add a new CONFIG_CIFS_ROOT option for allowing SMB shares to be mounted as the root file-system via the CIFS kernel module. The cifsroot= and ip= kernel parameters are needed to ultimately specify the network details for connecting to the Samba server.

More details on this work can be found via this patch series including the first patch with more documentation on this support for root file-systems via Samba shares.

These patches aren't in the current CIFS for-next branch so it doesn't look like this functionality will be making it for Linux 5.4.