The New NTFS File-System Driver Has Been Submitted For Linux 5.15
Last year Paragon Software made the surprise announcement that they were looking to mainline their NTFS3 kernel driver that previously was commercial-only. But given that there are less organizations interested in NTFS these days but rather Microsoft exFAT and even file-systems like F2FS for Android, it's nice to see Paragon finally willing to mainline the driver and also commit to maintaining it upstream moving forward.
Over the past year the NTFS3 driver has gone through many rounds of review to improve the code quality and make it better aligned with upstream coding standards. This driver offers much better functionality than the current upstream kernel driver, especially with write support in good order and other features not found in the largely unmaintained kernel driver. The NTFS3 driver also wins in features and performance compared to the FUSE-based open-source NTFS driver that is also available.
Earlier this summer Linus Torvalds called on the NTFS driver for upstreaming and it looks like that will now happen for Linux 5.15.
On Thursday night, Linus posted on the kernel mailing list asking whether the NTFS3 pull request would be submitted this cycle... Well, a short time ago Konstantin Komarov of Paragon has submitted that pull request.
Komarov summed up the current state in the PR, "This is NTFS read-write driver. Current version works with normal/compressed/sparse files and supports acl, NTFS journal replaying. Most of the code was in linux-next branch since Aug 13, but there are some patches, that were in linux-next branch only for a couple of days. Hopefully it is ok - no regression was detected in tests."
Linux 5.15 is looking to be quite exciting.
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