Well this wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025… There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There’s long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is “NTFSPLUS” as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3.
This NTFSPLUS driver carries some weight as its development was led by Namjae Jeon. Namjae Jeon is the Linux kernel developer who developed the exFAT Linux driver, maintainer of the KSMBD kernel server code, and other Linux storage achievements. He’s now taken to improving the NTFS support on Linux.
Namjae Jeon explained in the NTFSPLUS release announcement out of the motivation for now having yet another NTFS option for Linux:
“The NTFS filesystem still remains the default filesystem for Windows and The well-maintained NTFS driver in the Linux kernel enhances interoperability with Windows devices, making it easier for Linux users to work with NTFS-formatted drives. Currently, ntfs support in Linux was the long-neglected NTFS Classic (read-only), which has been removed from the Linux kernel, leaving the poorly maintained ntfs3. ntfs3 still has many problems and is poorly maintained, so users and distributions are still using the old legacy ntfs-3g.
What is ntfsplus?
=================The remade ntfs called ntfsplus is an implementation that supports write and the essential requirements(iomap, no buffer-head, utilities, xfstests test result) based on read-only classic NTFS. The old read-only ntfs code is much cleaner, with extensive comments, offers readability that makes understanding NTFS easier. This is why ntfsplus was developed on old read-only NTFS base. The target is to provide current trends(iomap, no buffer head, folio), enhanced performance, stable maintenance, utility support including fsck.”
NTFSPLUS offers write support unlike the original Linux kernel driver. Compared to Paragon’s NTFS3 code, NTFSPLUS offers IOmap support, no buffer head, public user-space utilities, IDMAPPED mount support, delayed allocation, and plans to support journaling unlike NTFS3’s inoperative implementation.
Benchmarks shown by Namjae Jeon are indicating NTFSPLUS having very significant performance advantages in multi-threaded write tests and minor advantages in single-threaded tests. The read throughput is similar for both file-systems.
Those interested in NTFSPLUS can see this driver patch series with the 34.5k lines of new code working on this NTFS driver implementation. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
