During the Linux 7.1 development cycle, the NTFS file system support, which has long attracted much attention, has made important progress: a new set of NTFS kernel drivers that have been refactored for many years have been officially integrated into the mainline, and were described by Linus Torvalds as "ntfs resurrection" (NTFS resurrection). This driver is designed to make up for the shortcomings in functionality and maintenance of the current NTFS3 driver submitted by Paragon and the earlier read-only NTFS driver, providing Linux with more modern, writable and actively maintained NTFS support.
Namjae Jeon, the Linux developer responsible for this work, has spent the past four years completely overhauling the early NTFS kernel driver. While retaining a cleaner code base, he has introduced write support, better protocol compatibility, and a series of modern features, hoping to comprehensively surpass the current NTFS3 implementation in terms of reliability, functionality, and maintainability. Compared with the NTFS3 driver, which was merged into the mainline a few years ago but has basically stagnated in recent years, this new driver is regarded as the main evolution direction of Linux NTFS support in the future.
In this week's file system-related merge request for Linux 7.1, the new NTFS driver was initially packaged and submitted to Linus Torvalds. However, Torvalds found a problem with the Git commit structure during the review process, and then rolled back the merge, requiring the commit history to be rearranged according to its standards. Subsequently, Namjae Jeon quickly adjusted and resent the improved merge request, which met Torvalds's requirements for code organization and submission quality, allowing the new driver to be successfully merged.
As of the evening of the 17th local time, the new NTFS driver has officially entered the mainline kernel code base, and the corresponding merge submission is publicly available on kernel.org, where developers can learn about the specific improvements in performance, functionality, and code quality of this driver. According to Linus Torvalds' comments at the time of the merger, he called the merger "ntfs resurrection", highlighting the "rebirth" significance of this work for the long-stagnant NTFS support.
It should be noted that, at least at the current stage, the existing NTFS3 driver will continue to remain in the kernel source tree, and the old and new implementations will coexist for a period of time. For users and distribution maintainers who want to try out this new NTFS implementation, the new driver can be enabled through the NTFS_FS Kconfig option in the kernel configuration for testing and verification in a real environment.
For the Linux storage subsystem, the "resurrection" of the NTFS driver means another step forward in compatibility with mainstream Windows file systems. It also reflects the community's determination to modernize and reconstruct the subsystem that has existed for a long time but has been lagging in maintenance. As the development process of Linux 7.1 advances, the performance of the new NTFS driver in real scenarios and its subsequent evolution are expected to become one of the focuses of major distributions and server and desktop users.
learn more:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=cdd4dc3aebeab43a72ce0bc2b5bab6f0a80b97a5