New NTFS Driver Misses Out On Linux 5.12 But Revved A 22nd Time

While Linux 5.12 has many great new features, what you won't find in the mainline kernel is the new "NTFS3" kernel driver developed by Paragon Software for NTFS file-systems. That driver is still coming for a future kernel and has now been sent out a twenty-second time for review.

Last summer was the big surprise of Paragon wanting to upstream their NTFS kernel driver to replace the Linux kernel's existing NTFS driver that is mostly read-only and quite basic. Paragon's "NTFS3" driver fully supports reads and writes and many other features not found with the existing Linux driver. This new driver is much better off for those needing to deal with Microsoft NTFS file-systems from Linux. The NTFS3 driver is also more performant than the FUSE-based NTFS driver that is also available and currently preferred by some distributions.

Paragon has been actively working to get the driver in order so it meets all the upstream requirements, issues pointed out during code review, and other practices. So while it missed the 5.12 merge window, the 22nd version of the patches are now out.

With the latest version of these patches sent out on Monday there are a few more code fixes plus moving to LLVM Clang 11.0 for code formatting rather than 10.0.

With the v22 patches it continues to look like work is settling down on this new driver so perhaps for the 5.13 kernel over the summer we might finally see it merged to provide a much better NTFS Linux support experience.