"NTFS3" Linux Driver Spun Up An 11th Time With More Optimizations

It's looking like Paragon Software's "NTFS3" read-write Linux driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system is on a trajectory where we could see it land possibly with the Linux 5.11 kernel kicking off at year's end. Friday marked the eleventh iteration of these patches that Paragon previously offered to commercial customers but is now in the process of being upstreamed.

It's been an interesting journey since Paragon announced in August their NTFS3 driver that they were interested in upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel to ultimately replace the existing NTFS kernel driver that is predominantly read-only and not actively maintained. Now that they don't have much commercial life left out of their NTFS driver, they are looking to upstream it while still supporting it.

Their initial patches were quickly critiqued but Paragon Software was good on quickly addressing feedback. They've been spinning up new revisions to continue addressing review feedback while also filling in more features.

The "v11" patches to the NTFS3 driver posted on Friday have more compressed file optimizations by skipping read/write bufferization, the journal wipe to the initial state is also optimized, there is optimized run storage with re-packaging the cluster meta-information, various fixes, and a new extended attribute so compressed/sparse/normal can be set for empty files.

These latest patches can be found on lore.kernel.org. If all goes well hopefully we will see this new NTFS driver makes its debut in Linux 5.11 for improving the read-write NTFS support experience on Linux.