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New NTFS File-System Driver Submitted For Linux 7.1 (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Making today very exciting in Linux 7.1 merge window land was a pull request being sent out for introducing the new, modern NTFS file-system driver. Linus Torvalds has yet to comment if he's going to merge the new driver but it looks like it's ready for providing a better Linux NTFS experience over the current NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed by Paragon Software a few years ago and hasn't seen too much feature progress.

Veteran Linux developer Namjae Jeon who has been responsible for exFAT driver work, KSMBD, and other kernel contributions announced NTFSPLUS last year as a better NTFS driver with greater performance and more features over what the NTFS3 driver or other NTFS driver alternatives provides. That driver has been iterated on in recent months and ultimately dropped the "NTFS PLUS" name as just taking on a remake of the original Linux NTFS kernel driver.

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[–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

there are problems with the old driver? Man you think at some point a tecnology is just complete, but apparently no.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    I think it's mostly maintenance issues, the maintainers being employees of the company that originally wrote and donated the driver, so there's been a backlog of bugs that have sat unfixed.

    This new driver on the other hand builds off the preexisting kernel support for NTFS, and the maintainer seems better equipped to respond to bugs in a timely manner.

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    [–] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I did not see this coming. I thought the "recent" new driver NTFS3 is the ultimate driver. You can bet phoronix will do performance comparisons once it is available in mainstream. Is performance the only reason or are there other technical reasons for creating this new driver?

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  • [–] 26 points 6 months ago

    This four-year-long effort by Namjae Jeon has resulted in full write support, better stability compared to NTFS3 with passing more XFStests, new user-space utilities for FSCK and more, and making use of modern Linux kernel features like IOmap and folio integration. The newer kernel tech integration is better off than the current NTFS3 driver.

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago

    From the article:

    "a better NTFS driver with greater performance and more features over what the NTFS3 driver or other NTFS driver alternatives provides"

    "full write support, better stability compared to NTFS3 with passing more XFStests, new user-space utilities for FSCK and more, and making use of modern Linux kernel features like IOmap and folio integration."

    No idea what most of these words mean 😅 Full write support is great!

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