Paragon Sends Out Updated NTFS Driver They Want To Mainline For The Linux Kernel

Coming as a surprise last week was word of Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS read-write driver as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS Linux kernel driver. An updated patch series for that much improved NTFS Linux kernel driver is now available.

As explained last week, the existing NTFS kernel driver for Linux is primarily read-only and lacks much functionality. There is also the NTFS-3G driver that is more common for Linux users needing NTFS support, but that is FUSE-based. Paragon meanwhile is looking to mainline "ntfs3" as their previously commercial NTFS kernel driver.

The Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver has fully functioning write support, implements NTFS 3.1 specifications, and supports many other features not currently available with the mainline Tuxera NTFS kernel driver.

One of the main code criticisms to the initial patch volley last week was that it was sent out as a single ~27k lines of code kernel patch. With the "V2" patches sent out a short time ago, at least this file-system driver is now split up into ten patches. The ten patches are split among the headers, super block initialization, compression, NTFS journal handling, wiring up the Kconfig support, and other logical areas to improve the code review process.

The 10 patches are now out there awaiting upstream kernel review and discussion to see if the file-system maintainers are interested in seeing this Paragon driver upstreamed. No other changes were mentioned with the "v2" patches besides seeing the work now split up nicely. Paragon has yet to publish their user-space utility code for this driver.