[HN Gopher] New NTFS Read-Write Driver from Paragon Merged to Li...
___________________________________________________________________
New NTFS Read-Write Driver from Paragon Merged to Linux Kernel
Author : beshrkayali
Score : 89 points
Date : 2021-09-04 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (git.kernel.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (git.kernel.org)
| jumelles wrote:
| Is this as big of a deal as it seems?
| canadaduane wrote:
| Does anyone know what confluence of events or motives made this
| land now? I'm grateful for their work--just curious why a
| commercial software company decided to make its main capability
| available for free.
| kasabali wrote:
| A bit more context:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/paragon-is-working-t...
|
| So just as a guess, maybe after Samsung's exfat code was merged
| into mainline, license and support revenue of their own exfat
| driver took a hit. So they decided it's in their interest to
| preemptively get their own ntfs driver in mainline thus they
| can get more support contracts this way?
| ch_123 wrote:
| There's an official statement here:
|
| https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs3-driver-faq/
|
| Reading between the lines, I suspect that the effort of
| maintaining an out-of-tree file system outweighed any money to
| be made from selling NTFS support to Linux users, especially
| when ntfs-3g is probably good enough for many use cases. They
| have a lot of other products, and it's possible that some of
| them leverage this NTFS support as well.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Anything out of the kernel source tree is pain in the ass for
| many reasons, ranging from a nuisance to impossible to use
| due to tainted kernel nullifying OS vendor support
| guarantees.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'd love to know once this is merged and has journaling if there
| are advantages to use NTFS instead of ext4 or other file systems
| as your main Linux FS, versus interop with windows drives.
| Kenji wrote:
| NTFS is shit. Ext4 is better in every single way, _especially_
| performance. Ditch the Windows shit if you can.
| generalizations wrote:
| IIRC, NTFS doesn't support permissions.
| Flimm wrote:
| NTFS actually does support permissions, it's Windows that
| doesn't. NTFS also supports symbolic links and hard links.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Um, I've had plenty of times I got a UAC (~windows sudo)
| prompt trying to access files I didn't have permissions to.
| nolok wrote:
| Not contradicting just genuinely wondering, what do you
| mean by windows doesn't? I have different permissions setup
| for various users on different folders on ntfs volumes in
| regular windows 10 installs. Or do you mean another sort of
| permissions?
| zamadatix wrote:
| In this context they are talking about the POSIX
| permissions related to running Linux on the drive which
| NTFS supports but Windows does not use. Instead Windows
| uses another attribute pointing to their security
| descriptor model which is also used by other non-file
| objects throughout the OS.
| zamadatix wrote:
| config NTFS3_FS_POSIX_ACL
|
| bool "NTFS POSIX Access Control Lists"
|
| depends on NTFS3_FS
|
| select FS_POSIX_ACL
|
| help
|
| POSIX Access Control Lists (ACLs) support additional access
| rights for users and groups beyond the standard
| owner/group/world scheme, and this option selects support for
| ACLs specifically for ntfs filesystems.
|
| NOTE: this is linux only feature. Windows will ignore these
| ACLs.
| [deleted]
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Looking forward to testing this out with games installed in my
| Windows partition. Hopefully won't need to have a dedicated
| partition for Linux games anymore.
| compsciphd wrote:
| why couldn't you have used ntfs3g before then in read-only
| mode. or even the only ntfs in kernel code in read only mode.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Some games flat out won't work with read only and for the
| ones that do if they are still receiving regular updates it's
| going to be a PITA. Also a PITA when you want to add a new
| game.
|
| Not to mention both ntfs-3g and even the previous kernel
| driver weren't exactly performance marvels.
| jtvjan wrote:
| Now all that's left is for Microsoft to add EXT support to NT.
| xook wrote:
| There are third party tools to read from Ext partitions, but
| unfortunately, writing to the filesystem seems to be a footgun
| roulette situation.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Since they've went the way of having WSL2 physical mounts show
| up in \wsl$ this summer I don't think there is much push for
| native <pick your FS> support.
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/access-linux-file...
|
| Would definitely be cool but Linux supporting NTFS only makes
| it even less necessary on top of that.
| Namidairo wrote:
| You can only mount entire physical disks under WSL2 though,
| as opposed to single partitions, which makes it a showstopper
| depending on your layout. (Common single disk configurations
| like a laptop/ultrabook come to mind)
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| I hadn't considered how this being in the upstream kernel
| would make it possible to run my WSL2 on NTFS natively.
| That's pretty cool. I'm sure there's still some stuff to
| figure out, but still pretty awesome.
| phkahler wrote:
| Doesn't WSL2 already have the ability to read NTFS somehow?
| Isnt this just an optimization?
| flatiron wrote:
| It's a network mount. Hence it's "don't use it cause it's
| shitty" reputation.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Well you could do that too but you'd lose permissions
| between the two (NTFS supports POSIX permissions but Linux
| doesn't and vice versa with Windows permissions).
|
| The blog post is really about making any Linux mountable FS
| available to the Windows side of WSL2 without NT needing to
| support it. E.g. it doesn't matter if the drive is NTFS or
| Ext4 or BobYourUncleFS as long as the Linux kernel can
| mount the FS you can mount it in WSL2 and access it from
| Windows without NT needing to support the OS. It also
| already works in reverse, volumes mounted in Windows
| (including NTFS) can also be shared with WSL2.
|
| It's really just their integrated-into-the-OS version of VM
| guest filesystem sharing.
| dataflow wrote:
| Does this mean we can boot from Linux from NTFS from mainline
| now?!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-04 23:01 UTC)