Concerns Raised Over The "New" NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Concerns Raised Over The "New" NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year

Back in 2020 file-system driver provider Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel. This driver was previously a proprietary, commercial offering from the company but given the state of NTFS these days they wanted to upstream this driver with full read/write support and other features not found within the existing NTFS driver. Finally last year after going through many rounds of review, the new driver was merged into Linux 5.15. Sadly, less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTFS3-Linux-Driver-2022-Sad

[Shagga, Son of Dolf]

This imho shows, why Microsofts apparent support for OSS is only hollow marketing for the masses and for maintaining an image, and has not led to any actions and changes of Microsoft outside some of their unimportant side projects on which they don't rely on at all. At places where they could help Linux, which they claim to love, they rely on 3rd-parties to do their work for them (NTFS, exFAT) instead of contribuiting directly, and their "support" consists of nothing but not suing and not enforcing patents.

[M@GOid]

Well, then fork the thing, dump the unmaintained code and when Paragon came back from all that snorting with "escorts", tell then to pound sand.

[skeevy420]

I like to shit on Microsoft and the various evil corporations whenever I get a chance, but how is Paragon releasing a driver and fucking up the long-term support Microsoft's fault? The only reasons I can think of are "they didn't port their driver first" and "they didn't setup and maintain someone else's work for free". If anything, Paragon outta be shamed here for releasing something to mainline Linux and then ghosting all of us.

[Shagga, Son of Dolf]

I like to shit on Microsoft and the various evil corporations whenever I get a chance, but how is Paragon releasing a driver and fucking up the long-term support Microsoft's fault?

NTFS and exFAT are both Microsofts file systems. Microsoft is developing them, Microsoft is deciding where to take them, so they should maintain a driver for it. Especially since they are so vocal telling everybody how the love Linux and OSS now.

[birdie]

I like to shit on Microsoft and the various evil corporations whenever I get a chance, but how is Paragon releasing a driver and fucking up the long-term support Microsoft's fault? The only reasons I can think of are "they didn't port their driver first" and "they didn't setup and maintain someone else's work for free". If anything, Paragon outta be shamed here for releasing something to mainline Linux and then ghosting all of us.

"ghosting all of us"? The fuck is wrong with you? Paragon has given us a great working driver which needs minor fixes here and there. OK, Konstantin has stepped away from maintaining it, so fucking what? No one in the fucking community can step up? Just "I vote to remove"?

For years the whole community asked for a native driver, the one was given with no strings attached, oh, god, no one actually cares or wants to continue developing it.

Just like two years ago Linus removed the console scrollback buffer in the kernel and ... while hundreds of people lamented it, the feature has not been reimplemented and no one effectively gave a fuck.

Again, the open source community is either corporations which use it to extract profits or freeloaders who claim they love Open Source while doing effectively nothing for it, not even contributing financially.

I'm sure as hell, we'd had volunteers willing to do the work, had it been paid. Alas, in the magical Open Source land things appear out of thin air. Oh, wait, they don't.

Keep on churning accusations against ... Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, etc. etc. etc. Just never look in the mirror.

[birdie]

NTFS and exFAT are both Microsofts file systems. Microsoft is developing them, Microsoft is deciding where to take them, so they should maintain a driver for it. Especially since they are so vocal telling everybody how the love Linux and OSS now.

What? These two filesystems are developed only for Windows. Exfat specifications were released by Microsoft but the code was actually contributed by Samsung.

[kiffmet]

It could be one of these "the maintainer currently has to deal with personal/health/life issues" things and he'll become responsive again, once he's better. Wouldn't be the first time someone behind an opensource project goes missing for a few weeks without any warning/notice and then returns.

[microcode]

Gotta say, NTFS-3g is basically fine for most people I think. The performance is good, and I doubt there are many demanding NTFS as a boot volume filesystem on Linux.

[birdie]

Gotta say, NTFS-3g is basically fine for most people I think. The performance is good, and I doubt there are many demanding NTFS as a boot volume filesystem on Linux.

NTFS-3G is known to corrupt volumes when downloading torrents. Maybe it's a very special use case, I dunno.