Linux 6.9 Set To Drop The Old NTFS File-System Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 6.9 Set To Drop The Old NTFS File-System Driver

Merged two years ago with Linux 5.15 with the "NTFS3" driver developed by Paragon Software with working read-write support and other improvements for supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system driver. This driver was a big improvement over the original NTFS read-only driver found in the mainline kernel and faster than using the NTFS-3G FUSE file-system driver. Now with enough time having passed and the NTFS3 driver working out well, the older NTFS driver is set for removal...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.9-Dropping-Old-NTFS

[L_A_G]

I personally assumed they'd already removed it until I recently lost whole directory on the NTFS partition I use to move data across Windows and Linux. File system foul-ups like this is something the old driver is kind of infamous for, being developed out of a reverse-engineering effort due NTFS being an entirely proprietary filesystem. Thankfully I was able to recover the files at least with testdisk, but I still need to figure out how to recover the 100+ GB of space still allocated to these otherwise inaccessible files without formatting the partition.

Seriously, the faster the old driver dies in a figurative fire, the better.

Or maybe I'm just getting overly worked up about being inconvenienced again by the old driver... Its not the first time I've had these kinds of issues with it.

[uid313]

Does the NTFS3 driver support all features of the NTFS file system?

Maybe would interesting with some benchmarks of NTFS on Linux vs NTFS on Windows 11.

Microsoft also have another file system called ReFS.
Apple have a file system called Apple File System (APFS).

[timofonic]

Does the NTFS3 driver support all features of the NTFS file system?

Maybe would interesting with some benchmarks of NTFS on Linux vs NTFS on Windows 11.

I would like to know that. Benchmarks would be nice too, I'm curious about it.

Microsoft also have another file system called ReFS.
Apple have a file system called Apple File System (APFS).

Paragon Software have Linux and Mac implementations of both, sold as proprietary software. Even APFS for Windows and NTFS for Mac too.

[Danny3]

Does the new NTFS driver supports well the dates and times of folders and files?
For example If I copy a folder of items from a NTFS partition to a BTRFS partition, are all the dates and times copied / converted correctly, so they are not lost and are showed like in the original place?

[avis]

The old driver was read only anyways, so nothing of value has been lost.

Does the new NTFS driver supports well the dates and times of folders and files?
For example If I copy a folder of items from a NTFS partition to a BTRFS partition, are all the dates and times copied / converted correctly, so they are not lost and are showed like in the original place?

I've not had any issues with that. Copying to Linux partitions will result in in btime (creation time) being lost but Linux still doesn't have an API call for that either in the kernel (syscall) or glibc.

[mrg666]

I have several dual boot systems and I have been using NTF3 reliably since ... I forgot when. So this will not make any difference for me as the old driver is not built anyway. Just to give some context, I use NTFS3 just to mount the NTFS drives (including portable) for copying a couple of files back and forth. I don't use NTFS as a permanent file system in Linux that I can comment on performance. Reliability is great though, it has never corrupted an NTFS file system, Windows did not complain about any file system anomalies after Linux modifications.

[cend]

Considering the featureset of NTFS3 looks like a strict superset of ntfs, good riddance.

[mackal]

I personally assumed they'd already removed it until I recently lost whole directory on the NTFS partition I use to move data across Windows and Linux. File system foul-ups like this is something the old driver is kind of infamous for, being developed out of a reverse-engineering effort due NTFS being an entirely proprietary filesystem. Thankfully I was able to recover the files at least with testdisk, but I still need to figure out how to recover the 100+ GB of space still allocated to these otherwise inaccessible files without formatting the partition.

Seriously, the faster the old driver dies in a figurative fire, the better.

Or maybe I'm just getting overly worked up about being inconvenienced again by the old driver... Its not the first time I've had these kinds of issues with it.

The old driver is read-only, it's going to be the fault of the new ntfs3 that caused you issues. I had the module blocked since I've had corruption issues as well, just use NTFS-3G still. Luckily it was just a flash drive I copy movies to bring to a friend's house so nothing was last and was easier to reformat than recover.

[Justin]

Some light reading on NTFS3 for those interested:

https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/ntfs3.html

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs3-driver-faq/

its worth noting, on their driver faq page on their main site - they were initially going to contribute more to their userspace utilities (we still have no proper mkfs util yet), however have since backtracked on their wording:

Are you planning to add any decent filesystem utilities? The existing alternatives such as fsck.NTFS/NTFSck and fsck.(v)fat don’t work well, and the community has been waiting for a fix.

Sep 06 2021

Yes, we plan to publish and open-source our mkfs.NTFS utility. We may also open-source rapidcopyfile and backup utilities for NTFS once mkfs has been published.

Current

Yes, we plan to publish and open-source our mkfs.NTFS utility.

There also doesn't seem to be a reliable userspace tool available to repair your NTFS3 partitions in case of issues. While ntfsfix exists, it's not designed for use with ntfs3 and serves more as a temporary fix that will inevitably lead to worse data corruption. This means that, in the event of a problem, booting into Windows for disk repair remains necessary.

I mention this from personal experience, having used ntfs3 even before it was upstreamed into the kernel and even now. While its stability has improved over time, it remains susceptible to corruption without a viable repair solution.