NTFS Driver Lands Some Late Feature Enhancements For Linux 6.12

While the Linux 6.12 merge window has been closed for more than one week, the modern NTFS "NTFS3" driver has seen some late feature enhancements as well as some fixes merged today for this new kernel version.

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software who continues to manage this modern NTFS read/write kernel driver for Linux sent out a merge request today with various enhancements and fixes. Among the changes are improved compression support and optimizing large writes to sparse files.

This NTFS driver didn't see any Git pull requests back during the Linux 6.12 merge window and so I was curious if Linus Torvalds would end up pulling this late feature code for the current cycle... He did. But it did lead him to comment:

"The bulk of this *really* should have come in during the merge window.

I've pulled it (.. because ntfs3), but still,"

So now merged for Linux 6.12 with this NTFS3 driver is support for fallocate for compressed files, support for the NTFS compression attribute, and optimizing large writes to sparse files. The optimized large writes into sparse files is done by optimizing cluster allocation by allocating a large chunk in advance of writing rather than allocating during the writing process by clusters. Among the fixes are for potential deadlocks, various internal bugs, and other changes.