New NTFS Linux Driver Spun A Ninth Time, Still Under Review

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New NTFS Linux Driver Spun A Ninth Time, Still Under Review

Back in August was the surprise that Paragon Software is looking to mainline their NTFS read-write driver in the mainline Linux kernel after years of offering it as a commercial driver for those needing reliable support for this Microsoft file-system on Linux. Two months later they are now up to their ninth revision of this driver in their pursuit of mainline inclusion...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTFS3-v9-Paragon-Linux-Driver

[ed31337]

Back in August was the surprise that Paragon Software is looking to mainline their NTFS read-write driver in the mainline Linux kernel after years of offering it as a commercial driver for those needing reliable support for this Microsoft file-system on Linux. Two months later they are now up to their ninth revision of this driver in their pursuit of mainline inclusion.

Does anybody have any suspicions as to why Paragon is looking to mainline their NTFS driver? Wouldn't this sabotage their commerical driver income? For something that would presumably be working against them for future revenue, they sure are keeping at this project!

Pure speculation: Perhaps Microsoft is secretly working towards rebasing Windows to run off of Linux? Maybe Microsoft is funding Paragon's efforts behind the scenes? Mainlining a full R/W commercial NTFS driver in Linux would help "Microsoft Linux" become closer to reality. This is the only explanation I can come up with as to why Paragon is suddenly so keen on doing this work...

First we got systemd, which makes services under Linux work a lot more like how services operate in Windows. Next we got exFAT file system support. Now we're getting NTFS file system support. Valve is working on WINE for playing old Windows games under Linux, despite very low Linux marketshare by their own statistics. Yesterday, we got Microsoft's open sourced Calculator ported to Linux...

It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle slowly being put together, piece by piece...

[re:fi.64]

Does anybody have any suspicions as to why Paragon is looking to mainline their NTFS driver? Wouldn't this sabotage their commerical driver income? For something that would presumably be working against them for future revenue, they sure are keeping at this project!

Pure speculation: Perhaps Microsoft is secretly working towards rebasing Windows to run off of Linux? Maybe Microsoft is funding Paragon's efforts behind the scenes? Mainlining a full R/W commercial NTFS driver in Linux would help "Microsoft Linux" become closer to reality. This is the only explanation I can come up with as to why Paragon is suddenly so keen on doing this work...

First we got systemd, which makes services under Linux work a lot more like how services operate in Windows. Next we got exFAT file system support. Now we're getting NTFS file system support. Valve is working on WINE for playing old Windows games under Linux, despite very low Linux marketshare by their own statistics. Yesterday, we got Microsoft's open sourced Calculator ported to Linux...

It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle slowly being put together, piece by piece...

- Seeing stuff like this isn't super uncommon, sometimes revenue falls and they may not have enough users to justify the (rather high) maintenance overhead of an out of tree driver at this point.
- systemd is far closer in style to macOS's launchd than Windows
- Valve investing in Linux gives them additional independence of their own store vs Microsoft's app store and Linux still makes them quite a bit of $, e.g. https://reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/co...porting_linux/
- I doubt having the Microsoft calculator running natively on Linux would be a blocker for, err, pretty much anyone...

[theriddick]

Maybe sometime we can get some benchmark comparisons to the current ntfs method vs this.

[eydee]

Does anybody have any suspicions as to why Paragon is looking to mainline their NTFS driver? Wouldn't this sabotage their commerical driver income? For something that would presumably be working against them for future revenue, they sure are keeping at this project!

Pure speculation: Perhaps Microsoft is secretly working towards rebasing Windows to run off of Linux? Maybe Microsoft is funding Paragon's efforts behind the scenes? Mainlining a full R/W commercial NTFS driver in Linux would help "Microsoft Linux" become closer to reality. This is the only explanation I can come up with as to why Paragon is suddenly so keen on doing this work...

First we got systemd, which makes services under Linux work a lot more like how services operate in Windows. Next we got exFAT file system support. Now we're getting NTFS file system support. Valve is working on WINE for playing old Windows games under Linux, despite very low Linux marketshare by their own statistics. Yesterday, we got Microsoft's open sourced Calculator ported to Linux...

It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle slowly being put together, piece by piece...

That doesn't make much sense. If MS wanted a decent NTFS driver in Linux, they could just use their own, not some 3rd party stuff. They could blame it LSW or just their "love" for Linux, no need to do anything secretly.

[Cattus_D]

I'm very glad that this is happening. Occasionally, I have to shift files between my Linux system and a Windows system at work. Windows has a habit of thinking there is something wrong with NTFS drives which I have written to using Linux; hopefully, this will resolve this issue.

[blacknova]

Maybe sometime we can get some benchmark comparisons to the current ntfs method vs this.

Agree fuse NTFS-3g sometime put some ungodly pressure on memory subsystem which can cause page out even if you have enough free RAM left.

[Eraserstp]

Wouldn't this sabotage their commerical driver income?

I don't think that this driver has a significant share in their revenues.

[eydee]

I'm very glad that this is happening. Occasionally, I have to shift files between my Linux system and a Windows system at work. Windows has a habit of thinking there is something wrong with NTFS drives which I have written to using Linux; hopefully, this will resolve this issue.

Ntfs-3g is already fully compatible. Your issue probably comes from you not disabling the so-called fast startup feature. It is a semi-hibernation feature that's being used instead of normal shutdown to fake a faster OS startup. It's enabled by default, and leaves all file systems in a "dirty" state. When dual-booting anything with widows, it's vital to have this turned off.

[hajj_3]

Windows XP SP1 source code leaked a few weeks ago. Would be pretty easy to look through the source code to get this driver working perfectly.