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[conspire] Safe NTFS read/write driver for Linux

Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:03:09 -0700

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:34:02 -0700
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net>
Subject: [conspire] Safe NTFS read/write driver for Linux
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=23836054&forum_id=2697

(I'm posting that URL for future reference, since I expect to keep hearing people say for years into the future that Linux NTFS support is unsafe.)

The author is the same gentleman who wrote ntfsresize, and helped me extensively with my knowledgebase's article on NTFS resizing.

From: Szakacsits Szabolcs <szaka at sienet.hu> [announcement] ntfs-3g: open source read-write driver 2006-07-14 10:39

As part of the Linux-NTFS project, I'm happy to announce my contribution to ntfsmount and libntfs which resulted ntfs-3g, a read-write ntfs driver, capable for unlimited file creation and deletion. The driver was successfully tested very exhaustively for a longer period of time by many ways and methods, creating and destroying millions of files and directories on newly created images, and on over 40 real, very diverse NTFS images collected over the last four years. The README file is copied below which includes more general, performance and quality information with answers and future plans. Please make a backup of your NTFS volume by ntfsclone and try to reproducible break ntfs-3g, if you can. If you are able to do so then please let us know, preferable providing your NTFS metadata image, if it couln't be reproduced by other ways. The driver can be downloaded from http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfs-3g-20070714-BETA.tgz Please note that I'm leaving for an over 5,000 km long Far North and Arctic Ocean advanture on Sunday morning (European time) and won't be able to read and answer emails for almost a month (no, I'm not escaping, I plan to come back alive ;). Originally I planned to fix all the minor issues listed below but no more time left for me and I think it's better to release now, in case I would get lost somewhere on the road ;) Well, actually I hope that most issues will be resolved when I'm back! Happy testing, problem reporting and coding, -- Szaka

[...]

I expect I'll be needing to Google-search this post quite a lot, in the future, to refute the inevitable claims to the contrary.

----- End forwarded message -----


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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:24:53 -0700

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:16:09 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [conspire] Safe NTFS read/write driver for Linux
Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):

> More FUSE fun in progress: ZFS!
> http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/

Go, Ricardo Correia!

FUSE rocks. It's especially nice with NTFS, for two reasons:

1. NTFS is pretty darned complex, and so Szaka's driver's implementation is necessarily likewise, even though it still punts (non-corruptingly) on about a dozen corner cases and doesn't yet handle permissions and ownership: When implemented in userspace, filesystem code choking can't bring down the entire system.

2. Red Hat (and perhaps others) still declines to include any NTFS driver in Linux distro kernels, on what are suspected to be patent grounds. FUSE lets people easily retrofit Szaka's ntfsmount fork without touching their kernels.

Even with the theoretical overhead of running entirely in userspace, Szaka's driver yields test results (using bonnie++) several times faster than ext3's. Adding support for file rights and those corner cases will undoubtedly slow it down, but still....

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