The NTFSPLUS Linux kernel driver as a modern NTFS file-system driver implementation continues quickly taking shape as it aims to become the most performant and feature-rich NTFS read/write driver for Linux systems.
It was just one month ago that NTFSPLUS was announced by veteran Linux storage/file-system developer Namjae Jeon. Since then Namjae Jeon has been quickly working on addressing remaining gaps in NTFSPLUS compared to Paragon’s NTFS3 driver and other NTFS driver alternatives.
Earlier this week I wrote about NTFSPLUS continuing to develop and “v2” patches in an “ntfs-next” Git branch. It remains to be seen how quickly Namjae Jeon will try to get NTFSPLUS in the mainline Linux kernel tree, but he has now announced the v2 iteration of NTFSPLUS and outlined its new features and capabilities.
With the updated NTFSPLUS code, NTFSPLUS is now clearly marked as an “experimental” driver for now. It also adds NTFS3-compatible mount options to ease moving over to this driver. Plus it also adds NTFS3-compatible get and set attribute options for files. It also now honors the iocharset mount option.
NTFSPLUS has also landed other features like support for the FITRIM ioctl for discard on SSDs, FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL for handling the file-system label, new documentation, and also now supporting the $MFT file extension. The $MFT with NTFS is for the Master File Table and can be used for storing metadata, locating file data, and other important metadata related handling.
v2:
– Add ntfs3-compatible mount options(sys_immutable, nohidden, hide_dot_files, nocase, acl, windows_names, disable_sparse, discard).
– Add iocharset mount option.
– Add ntfs3-compatible dos attribute and ntfs attribute load/store in setxattr/getattr().
– Add support for FS_IOC_{GET,SET}FSLABEL ioctl.
– Add support for FITRIM ioctl.
– Fix the warnings(duplicate symbol, __divdi3, etc) from kernel test robot.
– Prefix pr_xxx() with ntfsplus.
– Add support for $MFT File extension.
– Add Documentation/filesystems/ntfsplus.rst.
– Mark experimental.
– Remove BUG traps warnings from checkpatch.pl.
The NTFSPLUS performance is also looking good relative to the existing NTFS3 driver:
More details on this latest NTFSPLUS work via this mailing list post.
