Paragon Publishes Latest NTFS File-System Patches For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Paragon Publishes Latest NTFS File-System Patches For Linux

One of the pleasant kernel surprises in 2020 was Paragon Software looking to upstream their previously commercial NTFS driver. This driver offers read-write support and more advanced capabilities than the current read-focused NTFS driver presently in the mainline kernel and better off than the other FUSE-based driver. This driver hasn't been mainlined yet but Paragon published new patches on Christmas...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTFS-Linux-Driver-V16

[AJenbo]

Good to see that they are putting an effort in to getting this intergrated.

[gnarlin]

Will this finally include a proper fsck.ntfs utility that can fix ntfs file systems?

[milkylainen]

I feared that this would be come something botched, but it turns out I was very wrong indeed.
Seems it is properly vetted and coming along nicely. Yay!
I'm happy that I was wrong about the effort.

[mulenmar]

I will laugh, and laugh hard, if this ported driver ends up having better performance after all the rough bits are polished than Microsoft's own rather lackluster implementation does.

Seriously Microsoft, y'all have had around 2 decades to make listing a directory not take twenty seconds when it has a bunch of files and subdirectories inside.

[Xaero_Vincent]

So when this get implemented, we'll soon be able to use NTFS as the main Linux file-system for booting and storage?

[mdedetrich]

I will laugh, and laugh hard, if this ported driver ends up having better performance after all the rough bits are polished than Microsoft's own rather lackluster implementation does.

Seriously Microsoft, y'all have had around 2 decades to make listing a directory not take twenty seconds when it has a bunch of files and subdirectories inside.

I actually watched the a blog post from Microsoft explaining why its been practically impossible to improve NTFS this way over the years, and it was actually in the context of node.js. If people aren't aware, node.js stores its library dependencies in massively listed and nested directories and due to NTFS's poor directory lookup it created a lot of issues with node.js development on Windows.

From what I recall, Microsoft was stating that the NTFS filesystem is incredibly extensible but because of this it takes a massive toll on performance, one of the biggest problems is any arbitrary program being able to add hooks whenever filesystem operation happens (anti virus typically do this). I think the article concluded that they tried to throw many many man hours at the problem but they kinda hit the peak.

[timofonic]

Will this finally include a proper fsck.ntfs utility that can fix ntfs file systems?

I would love that, plus some more than that.

[mulenmar]

...its been practically impossible to improve NTFS this way over the years... I think the article concluded that they tried to throw many many man hours at the problem but they kinda hit the peak.

Jeez. First FAT, then FAT32, then NTFS, all having inescapable design issues... and exFAT lacking support for transparent encryption. Microsoft really needs to get out of the filesystem business!

Thanks for the response, good to know Microsoft didn't just sit on their hands about it.

[archkde]

I actually watched the a blog post from Microsoft explaining why its been practically impossible to improve NTFS this way over the years, and it was actually in the context of node.js. If people aren't aware, node.js stores its library dependencies in massively listed and nested directories and due to NTFS's poor directory lookup it created a lot of issues with node.js development on Windows.

From what I recall, Microsoft was stating that the NTFS filesystem is incredibly extensible but because of this it takes a massive toll on performance, one of the biggest problems is any arbitrary program being able to add hooks whenever filesystem operation happens (anti virus typically do this). I think the article concluded that they tried to throw many many man hours at the problem but they kinda hit the peak.

And when you're done with node development, you'll find out you can't delete your node_modules the normal way.