Linus Torvalds wants a new NTFS driver and Paragon Software's is the one

Recently Linus Torvalds announced the release of the first candidate version for Linux 5.14 and on this the kernel development team continues to work on the final details before the stable version.hey it is speculated that the stable version of Linux 5.14 could come with a new NTFS driver, in particular the "NTFS3" driver from Paragon Software.

And is that in a post on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds asked Paragon Software to submit the code to merge their new NTFS driver. The driver could be added in Linux 5.14-rc2, although Torvalds considers this version to be too big already. If not, the driver should be ready for Linux 5.15.

We just don't have anyone to pipe new filesystems: fsdevel
The mailing list is good for comments and getting feedback, but sometime someone just needs to submit it, and that's not what fsdevel ends up doing.

The argument that 'it is already in a much better state than before
ntfs driver «may not be a very strong technical argument (not because
from any Paragon problems, just because the old ntfs driver is not
cool), but it's a pretty strong argument to merge the new
by Paragon.

When discussing the issue of separation of powers by maintaining code for filesystems and VFS-related drivers, Linus Torvalds expressed willingness to accept patches directly With the new implementation of the NTFS file system, if Paragon Software assumes the responsibilities of NTFS as the file system maintainer in the Linux kernel and receives confirmation from other kernel developers that they have reviewed the correctness of the code (apparently, the confirmation It is now available).

Linus noted that among the VFS kernel developers there are no responsible people from receiving pull requests with new FSs, so such requests can be sent to him personally.

En general, Linus hinted that he doesn't see any special problems with adopting the new NTFS code. in the main part of the kernel, as the deplorable state of the old NTFS driver does not stand up to criticism and there have been no major complaints about the new Paragon driver for a year.

This driver is already in a much better functional state than the previous ntfs driver from 2001.

If the new ntfs code has comments from people, and it looks like it did
get them, and Paragon is expected to be the one to keep it, then I
I think Paragon should make a git pull request for it.

And it is that this year 26 versions of the ntfs3 patches were proposed within the "linux-fsdevel" mailing list for review, of which the comments have been removed, but the question of inclusion in the kernel it has stalled due to the impossibility of finding maintainers of the VFS, They could make a decision on conceptual questions: what to do with the old ntfs driver and whether to implement legacy FAT ioctl calls in the new driver.

In its current form, to accept patches, it is necessary to ensure compatibility in ntfs3 with the changes made recently in the iov API, so the patch has stopped building and if possible translate the code to use fs / iomap (this is assumed not critical and the adaptation can already be done when ntfs3 is in the kernel).

The code for the new NTFS driver was discovered by Paragon Software in August last year and differs from that already in the driver kernel by the ability to work in write mode.

The driver supports all the features of the current version of NTFS 3.1, including extended file attributes, data compression mode, efficient handling of file gaps, and replay of registry changes to restore integrity after crashes. .

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.


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