NTFS Driver Adds New Mount Options With Linux 6.2

The NTFS3 kernel driver, which was contributed to the mainline kernel by Paragon Software for read/write NTFS file-system support and other features while being faster than the NTFS-3g FUSE driver, is seeing a number of updates with the Linux 6.2 kernel.

First up with the NTFS3 kernel driver changes for Linux 6.2 is a new "hidedotfiles" mount option. When using this new option, files/holders beginning with a "." will now have the NTFS attribute set of "hidden". Files/folders beginning with a period are used on Linux systems for setting them as hidden files/folders. Windows/NTFS doesn't behave the same way for dot files but with this optional mount option it can also set the file attribute as hidden to behave in the same manner when mounted under Windows.

Another new NTFS3 driver mount option with Linux 6.2 is the "nocase" case-insensitive mount option. This enables case-insensitive file/folder support similar to the default behavior under Windows with NTFS volumes.

The third new mount option for the NTFS file-system support with Linux 6.2 is "windows_names". The "windows_names" mount option prevents the creation of files or directories with names not allowed under Windows. This checks for forbidden characters in the name like /, \, :, *, ?, <, >, |, " or ending with a space or a period. There are also other checks for matching the behavior of Windows with this mount option for rejecting file/folder names that may be valid on Linux systems but not under Windows.

In addition to these three new mount options for increasing compatibility / same behavior with Windows, there are also some bug fixes to the kernel file-system driver. The full list of patches for the NTFS3 driver work this cycle can be found via this pull request.