"Future is very bright!" – In Memoriam Steve French

“Future is very bright!”

That is the second-to-last slide of Steve French's final sambaXP talk. He recorded it at home in April, because he was already too ill to travel to Göttingen.

Steve died on 21 August 2026, a few days after handing over maintainership of the Linux kernel's SMB client because of his illness. If you have ever mounted an SMB share on Linux, you have run cifs.ko. Steve wrote it and then maintained it for more than twenty years.

We at SerNet GmbH started sambaXP in 2002 to get the Samba Team and the people who build on their work into one room once a year. Steve was there from the first one, and part of every single edition since. 25 out of 25. Not always in the room – there were the years when he joined remotely, and this year he could not come at all – but there was always a session from Steve, often more.

He was one of the people who made the conference what it is. He stayed for the questions. For the corridor conversation after the questions. And he was as ready to explain SMB to a first-time attendee as to argue protocol details with a fellow maintainer.

Of all the subjects he worked on, the one that ran closest to our own work in recent years was the SMB3.1.1 POSIX extensions. For years Steve presented the client side at sambaXP while the server side had its own slot in the agenda. This year he finally got to report it finished: production-ready in both Linux and Samba.

Classic Steve, this year again: the state of the code, reported with the benchmarks to back every claim. 582 changesets in cifs.ko over twelve months, more than any other network filesystem in the kernel. Directory leases bringing a repeated "ls" down to zero roundtrips to the server, with the before-and-after output pasted onto the slide. Then a list of what was coming next. Because there was always something coming next.

And running through all of it, the thank-yous. What stays with you is that he named the developer behind almost every improvement he presented. Half his slides handed credit to other people.

In the tributes written after his passing, the same man appears from every direction. Developers whose first upstream patch he merged. Colleagues from his IBM years who say he made time for them when they were nobody. Engineers who could not walk past his office without a real conversation starting. Brilliant, people write, and in the same breath: kind, humble, generous with his time.

We would like to honor him by watching his talk one more time:
youtu.be/1QSQEksusAg

He included that last slide knowing he could not make the trip. He will be missed dearly.

Farewell, Steve.