Announced last month was the NTFSPLUS driver as a new NTFS file-system driver for the Linux kernel with better write performance and more features compared to the existing NTFS options. A second iteration of that driver was recently queued into “ntfs-next” raising prospects that this NTFSPLUS driver could soon attempt to land in the mainline Linux kernel.
Namjae Jeon as the exFAT Linux driver developer, KSMBD maintainer, and contributions to other Linux storage code is the one that has been leading the NTFSPLUS effort. The NTFSPLUS driver offers better performance, a cleaner codebase, and other improvements compared to Paragon’s NTFS3 driver that is within maintenance mode in the mainline kernel and compared to the other NTFS read-only kernel driver.
Among the features with NTFSPLUS are IOmap support, IDMAPPED mount support, delayed allocation, public user-space utilities, and other features now and more planned in the future.
There hasn’t been any mailing list activity since October around “NTFSPLUS” but the code has continued to progress. I noticed within Namjae Jeon’s ntfs.git’s ntfs-next branch are “v2” patches of the NTFSPLUS driver committed in the past few days.
There is quite a lot of code churn with the NTFSPLUS v2 commits but no change-log found. With staging the code in an “ntfs-next” Git branch, we’ll see soon if there is an attempt to get NTFSPLUS mainlined into the Linux kernel.
