Without filesystem change notifications, autoimport will not work in real time. It's designed to pick up filesystem events and just import the changed files, and then to re-run itself at fixed intervals to catch anything that fell through the cracks. Without filesystem events there will be no real-time auto-import, but
- There are no change notification for mounts with cifs, because of the VFS hooks.
That's not the case. My understanding is that Samba implemented filesystem notifications using inotify in Samba 3.6.2 (
https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-3.6.2.html), with some refinements in samba 4. What version of Samba are you running?
I use auto-import across cifs every day and get filesystem notification events. Admittedly my daily usage is a windows machine running JRiver watching a cifs share hosted on a Linux box, not the other way around, but auto-import mostly "just works" for me which means I'm getting filesystem events from the Linux box regularly.
So if you have an up to date Samba, something else is at issue here. Maybe try mounting the shares read/write? What distro/version are you running? What OS is the computer hosting the shares?