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

[skeevy420]

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.

That's basically my experience with it, too. I've never used it full time, managed by the system on startup and shutdown, but I do use it for mounting my Windows root on Linux for file exchanging occasionally and it works great for that. Windows has never complained or tried to check the disk afterwards.

[rclark]

If you are s Linux user, there really isn't any reason to use NTFS at all. The edge case I suppose is portable drives. I normally format them to to ext4 and call it good. Thumb drives I leave alone as the wife occasionally likes to load up some pictures to get printed. So good to have 'some' M$ disk format support.

No problem here with the drop.

[cend]

The edge case I suppose is portable drives.

...for which NTFS is mostly shadowed by exFAT anyway, with good read-write drivers and tools available bundled or for gratis on pretty much any recent-ish platform.

[L_A_G]

...

If I was purely a Linux user then then I wouldn't touch NTFS with a barge pole. Sadly I use a bunch of stuff like flight sim gear which is niche enough that the developers don't really have the incentive to get it to work well under Linux. Microsoft of the 90s is still around, just hiding its true face better. They still leverage their dominant market position and total refusal to support any open standards they're not forced to support to extort license payments from third parties. In file systems they steadfastly refuse to support anything other than their own just so that they can collect a license fee for FAT and EXFAT from makers of non-Windows devices.

The license fee every Android device maker had to pay for FAT and EXFAT support was literally the cornerstone of their "Android is not free" campaign to push them into adopting their since discontinued Windows Phone platform.

Our politicians sadly aren't tech savvy enough to understand this and go after them like they went with the crap they did in the 90s.

[avis]

If I was purely a Linux user then then I wouldn't touch NTFS with a barge pole. Sadly I use a bunch of stuff like flight sim gear which is niche enough that the developers don't really have the incentive to get it to work well under Linux. Microsoft of the 90s is still around, just hiding its true face better. They still leverage their dominant market position and total refusal to support any open standards they're not forced to support to extort license payments from third parties. In file systems they steadfastly refuse to support anything other than their own just so that they can collect a license fee for FAT and EXFAT from makers of non-Windows devices.

The license fee every Android device maker had to pay for FAT and EXFAT support was literally the cornerstone of their "Android is not free" campaign to push them into adopting their since discontinued Windows Phone platform.

Our politicians sadly aren't tech savvy enough to understand this and go after them like they went with the crap they did in the 90s.

Fat32 has been royalty-free for ages. At least get your facts straight.

And it would be nice to get up to date info on exfat licensing because I've not heard about that for many years now.

And I don't understand why you dislike their choice to create software products and sell them. They wouldn't have been a 2 trillion company giving out stuff for free.

[JPFSanders]

Our politicians sadly aren't tech savvy enough to understand this and go after them like they went with the crap they did in the 90s.

You're mistaken politicians are very savvy and understand microsoft is a big donor with deep pockets.

[L_A_G]

Fat32 has been royalty-free for ages. At least get your facts straight.

Yes, its been royalty free since the 4GB maximum file size made it unusable for anything other than legacy and small embedded systems.

And it would be nice to get up to date info on exfat licensing because I've not heard about that for many years now.

You either have to make a deal with Microsoft directly or be part of the "Open Innovation Network", which in turn means you either need to pay or contribute some major patents to it that you legally bind yourself into not suing Microsoft or any other member of the forum over. The Linux kernel implementation only exists because of Linux contributors being in this forum with patents they could sue Microsoft over.

Apple isn't in it and has to deal with Microsoft directly.

And I don't understand why you dislike their choice to create software products and sell them. They wouldn't have been a 2 trillion company giving out stuff for free.

Not everyone shares your laissez faire "There's no such thing as unethical business practices"-attitude. Some of us have moral compasses and if you don't like that we express views based on this, then you probably ought to get off the internet. There's always going to be people who disagree with you. Deal with it or leave.

You're mistaken politicians are very savvy and understand microsoft is a big donor with deep pockets.

Over here in Europe you can't legally bribe politicians like you can in the U.S and Russia.

Not that they don't figure out ways to get around it. In 2017 Microsoft made a deal with mayor of Munich to drop their effort to move to Linux and open source, the first major effort of this size in Europe, in return for them moving their EU headquarters to the city. Thou the city's apparently partially reneged on the deal since and are apparently trying to haggle with Microsoft for better terms and more jobs being moved to the city.

[soulnull]

I had a similar issue where the new NTFS driver ate a folder and refused to give the space back. Windows just said it was corrupted and Linux refused to open it. Only option was to reformat to get the 100 gigs back.

I mostly use Linux, but wanted to keep my game drive accessible on Windows. In such a case, btrfs has been the better option. The windows driver for btrfs is apparently similar to the NTFS Linux driver, where it *mostly* works, but can have issues at times. I haven't had these issues yet, but for my use case where I mostly use Linux, this seemed the more reasonable option.

Exfat can't symlink, so it won't work for steam on Linux, which was my main use case. Ext4 still isn't really usable on Windows. If you use Windows more than Linux, NTFS still makes sense to use for your "shared" drive.. but if you mostly use Linux and occasionally use Windows, look into btrfs/winbtrfs. It's the least frustrating experience I've had so far with Linux/Windows sharing a single steam library, and Just Works™ for everything else I've needed it to do. Even enabled filesystem compression. No issues. It all behaves natively and transparently on both Widows and Linux, I never even have to think about it.

[rmfx]

Linux is now a 1000th lighter.

[mercster]

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.

This is right, the NTFS3 driver still does not fully support NTFS journaling, i.e. if you lose power to a mounted disk, there's a good chance you'll have corruption that can only fully be clearned by a Windows rescue disk or some such. Happened to me one too many times.