Linux 6.9 Set to Drop the Old NTFS File-System Driver
phoronix.comNice! Russians opensourced a good ntfs driver finally, so we can retire an old stuff that was slow and generally a headache for years.
Paragon Software, particularly Konstanin Kamarov - it’s worth being specific.
This read-write driver has been a tremendous help to me, from Linux 5.15 till now. I hope they can soon publish the mkfs tool they committed to previously as well.
Good. Means it's more lean. And nothing's stopping someone installing NTFS functionality with apt. I once had to add exFAT[0] compatibility to Ubuntu because I had a thumb-drive flashed in that format.
> And nothing's stopping someone installing NTFS functionality with apt.
This would be wildly slow (if it runs in userspace using FUSE)
The good thing is that the kernel still includes a (better) ntfs driver
> This removes the old ntfs driver. The new ntfs3 driver is a full replacement that was merged over two years ago.
>This would be wildly slow (if it runs in userspace using FUSE)
NTFS-3G through FUSE is what most people are using. It's slower, but not that slow.
ntfs3 hasn't seen that much large-scale deployment, and you don't have to look very far to find people complaining about ending up with a messed up filesystem from it. I'd put a very modest level of trust in it not eating your data.
FUSE drivers are slow, but "wildly slow" is an overstatement.
Anyway, between FUSE, epoll, DMA, and userspace networking Linux is already enough of a microkernel to benefit from it; so when do our CPU oligopolists plan to turn their shared memory hardware into a useful message passing mechanism?
> FUSE drivers are slow, but "wildly slow" is an overstatement.
I can confirm this, I've played RPGMaker M{V,Z} games natively by swapping out the copy of NWJS¹ it shipped with and running it through a CIOPFS² mount.
2: https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/ciopfs/ / https://github.com/martanne/ciopfs
FUSE is what I’d call “quite slow”, but FUSE passthrough might finally land for Linux 6.9. https://www.phoronix.com/news/FUSE-Passthrough-In-6.9-Next
I don’t have the exact benchmark used to produce the numbers in the article, though. It may be in the half hour video.
You can install kernel modules with APT - You can even install source code for kernel modules that live outside-of-tree that are recompiled for your system with APT[1]
The new NTFS driver is still included in the kernel.
Leaner on the source code side. The developer wrote that nobody is building it. If it were in obvious use, they could not even propose removal, Linux promises not to break existing systems by upgrading to a newer kernel.
> Are you really trying root as exfat? Will never work. A linux filesystem must support file ownership and access rights per file, which exfat doesn’t. Linux runs only from ext4, btrfs, xfs or such.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/qa36mr/comm...
couldn't you just not include it when you build the kernel