One of the unexpected Linux kernel surprises of 2025 was NTFSPLUS being announced as a new driver for Microsoft’s NTFS file-system with better performance and more features compared to the classic read-only NTFS driver or the “NTFS3” kernel driver that Paragon Software submitted upstream. That NTFSPLUS driver has continued expanding its feature set and robustness and sent out today was the third iteration of the patches. Now this driver is simply being called “NTFS” with no longer going by the NTFSPLUS name.
With today’s v3 patch revision, the NTFSPLUS driver is simply called NTFS. In part this is being done since the patch series is now based on a revert of the old read-only NTFS driver. When Paragon got the NTFS3 driver upstreamed and stable, the old NTFS driver was removed. But NTFSPLUS started out as based on that original NTFS driver since its codebase is cleaner than that of NTFS3. To help the code review process moving forward, this new driver patch series starts out as a revert to restore that original NTFS driver code and then changes atop that — rather than introducing all of the driver code as new. This helps the code reviewers in just understanding what’s actually new changes over that original code to ease the review process and being able to forego looking at the code as closely that was already in the mainline kernel long ago.
Today’s v3 patch series also adds some new generic helpers, allows readahead for the $MFT file, removes a 2TB file-system limitation on 32-bit systems, and has a variety of other low-level improvements.
Those wishing to check out this latest patch series for bringing up this new NTFS driver implementation and its advantages over NTFS3/NTFS-3g FUSE or similar can see the patch cover letter for all the details. Along with that kernel driver, the ntfsprogs-plus user-space programs continue to be developed in tandem too, complete with a working NTFS FSCK implementation that was missing from prior driver user-space programs for NTFS.
