The Future of the NTFS Linux Driver as Part of the Kernel is in Question:
Support in the Linux kernel for NTFS, the primary filesystem for Windows systems, has always been important for people who use both operating systems. The existing Linux NTFS driver has been unmaintained and has always lacked proper write support. A filesystem in userspace (FUSE) driver, NTFS-3G, came along, but since it operates in userspace, it isn't considered particularly fast.
So when last August, the German software company Paragon Software offered to open source its in-house developed NTFS3 driver to become part of the Linux kernel, the news was welcomed among the Linux community. However, the driver was a proprietary software sold commercially before that.
[...] However, the first steps of adopting the driver as part of the Linux kernel were accompanied by many strange events and misunderstandings.
The point is that a straightforward procedure like creating a pull request (PR) proved to be a difficult task for the driver developers at Paragon Software. After several failed attempts, the driver was still submitted as a single dump of 27,000 lines of code!
Despite all the glitches, the driver was eventually implemented, and on October 31, 2021, Linux kernel 5.15 was officially announced with the Paragon NTFS3 driver integrated into it.
Unfortunately, thus far, the code has not received any maintenance.
[...] So, since the Paragon NTFS3 driver has been accepted as part of the Linux kernel, it hasn't received a single line of code support, and any attempts to contact its developer have failed.
After ntfs3 got merged and 5.15 got released ntfs3 maintainer has kept total radio silence. I have tried to contact him with personal mails with no luck. I have chosen bunch of people to discuss what we should do this driver as this is already orphan.
Kari Argillander, Linux kernel developer
[...] So, it's currently unclear what the future of the Paragon NTFS3 driver will be as part of the Linux kernel. But, of course, we look forward to Linus Torvalds' opinion on the situation, given that he is the person who makes the final decisions on the Linux kernel.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:41PM (35 children)
Were they expecting that by releasing it into the kernel, that it would be magically updated by someone else and they wouldn't have to do anything anymore?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:50PM (10 children)
They were expecting that this wouldn't result in them shooting themselves in the foot. The whole GPL philosophy of preventing the inclusion of code into proprietary products doesn't encourage companies to pay to develop software. Sure, companies do it, but they have to be aware that when they're doing it, they don't have as many options for creating their own modules and bits of code that aren't subject to the same viral provision the moment they distribute it out of the company.
In this case, it's rock and hard place. MS supports very few file systems compared with other OSes and the various FAT based FSes are getting a bit long in the tooth. In some respects, it would make more sense to just develop better drivers to run under Windows for copying files to Linux than to develop better tools to copy from Linux to Windows.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 29 2022, @02:34PM (3 children)
It would take less effort to develop a user space utility program that could recognize and manipulate a block of storage that contains any of the most popular file systems on Linux. No need to develop, sign and install a driver into Windows.
And then there is . . . WSL. Windows Subsystem for Linux. That is, a Linux that is provided by Microsoft and can be installed into Windows. Turnkey, ready to use. From inside WSL, you can access the Windows file system. You could use SCP or SFTP to copy between your Windows file system and a remote Linux that offers SSH.
Now all of that said, there is still value to having an NTFS driver in Linux. If you want to copy to/from someone else's pocket drive, what file system is it likely to have? NTFS of corse. [dictionary.com]
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @05:19AM (2 children)
Every pocket drive, thumb drive, or flash card I've ever seen came preformatted as FAT32.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @06:09PM (1 child)
Really? Even newer ones? They have 2TB flash drives now on Amazon for like ~$30, I don't know if FAT32 can handle that much space or anywhere close even.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @09:24PM
The theoretical maximum size for a FAT32 volume is 16 TB. The tradeoff is that it stores files less efficiently on the disk. By the time that really became an issue, most didn't really care because NTFS and other file systems without that limit came along.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by https on Friday April 29 2022, @03:29PM (5 children)
The GPL philosophy says nothing about "preventing the inclusion of code." it explicitly says it's OK to include GPL stuff in proprietary products - but you don't get to take other people's stuff and pass it off as your own.
A child can understand that. Only thieves pretend to not understand such simple things.
So fuck off with your 2001 "viral" bullshit. It's decades of boring, and life is to short for us honest people.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @03:35PM (4 children)
That's false, you have to gpl the code and provide it with the binaries. You can sort of skirt it if the code is separate, but this has long been the case. It's part of the design of the license.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday May 01 2022, @01:17PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday May 03 2022, @09:38PM (2 children)
If you sell it (or distribute it in any form), then you must make the code available.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 04 2022, @07:52AM (1 child)
You seem to be getting confused what "it" means.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Friday May 06 2022, @12:51AM
Ok, if it's all your own code, not based on anyone else's code, then yes, you can do anything even if you release it under GPL.
I stand corrected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @12:17AM (21 children)
Are people like you expecting the code will magically be maintained by *someone else*?
Seems silly to EXPECT someone to automatically be the permamaintainer, esp. since nobody was even maintaining the previous Linux driver for NTFS.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 29 2022, @12:54AM (20 children)
Seems at least as silly to have dropped the driver into the open source community, pushed for it to be included in the kernel, then abandon it. What was that all about? Virtue points?
What I've come to expect is, when I hotplug an NTFS drive into my machine, it just comes up into my file browser, where I can choose to mount the drive, or not mount it. Once mounted, I can do anything with it, because, after all, I'm root, or God, or however you wish to refer to me.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday April 29 2022, @12:59AM (10 children)
This is one thing about Linux Mint that still makes me facepalm. Now granted, I haven't done a fresh install in the last year or two, but every time I have before that, for some bizarre reason, the default setting is to auto-mount any device you plug in, and pop up a file browser of the location.
Doesn't anybody remember autoexec.bat?!
It also makes it annoying if you want to fiddle with your filesystems with gparted, since you have to go and manually unmount all the volumes that have been "helpfully" auto-mounted before you can manipulate them.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday April 29 2022, @06:23AM (1 child)
https://www.systutorials.com/how-to-disable-auto-mounting-on-linux-mint-cinnamon/ [systutorials.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 29 2022, @06:56AM
It's a trivial thing to disable after-the-fact, just annoying to have to deal with every time.
And I'm on Mint XFCE, not the mainline distro.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Adrian Harvey on Friday April 29 2022, @09:40AM (7 children)
[quote] Doesn't anybody remember autoexec.bat?! [/quote]
I remember autoexec.bat and I think you have it confused with autorun.inf
Autoexec.bat was the startup configuration script for DOS. It ran only once, on bootup.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday April 29 2022, @12:56PM (2 children)
He remembered that he remembered, but forgot he remembered incorrectly.
Methinks he needs a 'reminder' from Clippy:
"Hey, buddy! What you up to? Trying to remember something? Huh? You should try backing up your data...Microsoft backs up all it's data to the hard drive and then runs format.exe on it to make sure it's formatted correctly. Was i helpful to you, buddy? Huh?"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 29 2022, @02:39PM
Clippy:
"Unable to format drive A:. Maybe there is no disk inserted? Now formatting drive C: instead."
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @08:48PM
Press OK to accept, or Cancel to continue.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 29 2022, @01:38PM (1 child)
I remember fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get Ultima VII working right, ah good times. By which, I mean, may they never revisit us again. Exult is a nice engine that can play Ultima VII natively on modern systems. Though, it may still have some game breaking bugs. I've not played an entire run of Ultima VII on it, but it makes the experience much more enjoyable. Ultima VII like a lot of RPGs take a pretty large investment of time and aren't as fun in short increments. Which is generally what my gaming has been reduced to. Though, I also like playing co-op multiplayer games. Playing by myself, just isn't as fun.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2022, @02:08AM
Ultima VII was a bit of a special case, in that it ran in 32-bit mode but instead of DPMI used an in-house developed memory manager ("Voodoo") that was totally incompatible with DOS memory managers such as EMM386. Virtually every other 32-bit DOS game used DPMI and was not anywhere near as problematic to run.
Exult is great and the game is certainly playable to completion, but it's IMO not the best option if you want the original experience. Specifically, Exult has long suffered from weird NPC behaviour issues that are not present in the original game. Most of the known issues have been fixed but there are probably lots left which can really detract from the game's immersion.
That being said, it is possible to run the original game on modern systems in DOSbox to get a more authentic experience. It's so authentic, you probably have to twiddle with the memory management settings in DOSbox too!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 29 2022, @10:29PM
Oh. Right, that thing from 20 years ago.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @06:14PM
Remember win.ini ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @01:11AM
You're optimistic, a persistent-superblock against bad clusters at best.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 29 2022, @01:55AM (3 children)
Cynical me might bet they thought they'd get free development.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @03:50AM (2 children)
More likely, it wasn't selling very well and not really worth supporting.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @04:13AM (1 child)
It would be history repeating itself, IIRC. If memory serves, Tuxera dropped Linux-NTFS into the tree for the same reasons.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday April 29 2022, @06:55AM
Yes, excellent points and information, thank you both ACs.
AFAIK, M$ has never officially released NTFS specs, so technically it's still risky to mount / r / w NTFS under Linux. If I'm right so far, many would not seriously consider trusting it, so the market would probably be weak.
Now I wonder who wrote the NTFS driver for MacOS?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday April 29 2022, @02:41PM (3 children)
So you want people to use your desired pronouns?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 29 2022, @04:24PM (2 children)
🙄
I don't have the time or the inclination to remember your pronouns, I certainly don't expect anyone to worry about my pronouns. But, mine are pretty simple. I learned them in grammar school in the early 1960s. Pardon me if I don't respect pronouns that aren't obvious and simple. He, him, his, her, she, hers, it, it's, me, mine, you, yours. It's dazzlingly brilliant, in that no one has to know any secrets in order to refer to you.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday April 29 2022, @08:47PM
I'm having a hard enough time remembering people's names, let aloe their pronouns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @08:50PM
Secrets? You assume to know what's in their secret place. Disgusting.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday April 29 2022, @12:55AM
Well, I suppose that's better than never open-sourcing the code in the first place, right?
But from TFS I would say yes, that's probably what they thought. With sufficiently good documentation it shouldn't be impossible for somebody else to pick up the job...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @05:22AM
IIRC then what happened is that the devs that created the Linux NTFS filesystem driver retired and nobody wanted to take it over since the FUSE driver is generally better, if a bit slower.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday April 29 2022, @12:53AM (5 children)
So the original maintainers couldn't figure out how to set up a git repository, and eventually just said "screw it" and sent you a tarball of the entire source tree. Which you stitched into the kernel or whatever.
Then they lost contact.
Soooooo...just find somebody to maintain the presumably-now-gitted repo? Yeah, you lose the knowledge of all the original devs (not a small thing), and I know it's not super easy to find maintainers for FLOSS stuff (especially if it's a rather thankless task like FS support), but...which part of this is a question? That you can't find maintainers, or that the ones you do find aren't knowledgeable enough? Wasn't this a thing you originally planned for, i.e. the classic "what happens if the entire dev team is hit by a runaway beer truck" scenario?
Indulging in my own rare "why don't you just" proposal here ;)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @12:56AM (1 child)
OMG, not the infamous BEER TRUCK! We can handle runaway trains, out of control buses, even suicide bombing cars and trucks. But, please, not the BEER TRUCK!! Some things are sacred.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday April 29 2022, @12:58PM
BEER TRUCK! I'd hit that. ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @04:09AM (1 child)
There are plenty of NTFS devs. Kari Argillander has repeatedly offered to take over the NTFS3 driver. He also offered to co-maintain due to the maintainer being relatively new to the process. The learning curve of dealing with the kernel way is extra work on top of the actual work they are used to doing. Add in the fact that a number of the major NTFS devs at Paragon are Russian, and its not hard to see why their could be silence in this manner currently. The end result will most likely be to switch maintainers to Kari while the gallery yells over how Linux-NTFS will have write support *soon* and NTFS-3g is the true future.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Friday April 29 2022, @07:05AM
There's a userspace implementation already...how much of a problem is "not particularly fast"? If somebody wants an "enterprise solution", maybe they should step up and pay for it?
Be careful what you wish for I guess...next we'll see ntfsd, where Lennart Poettering finds some new and horrifying way to fuck it up, eh?
Reminds me of the quote I saw that supposedly only 8 people alive truly understand how to program X. Hail Eris?
Personally, I'd like to believe that FLOSS is above such things. Plus, more eyeballs make all bugs shallow, right? (about 1/3 sarcasm I guess)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Friday April 29 2022, @11:02AM
That was my reaction as well, this is a company that's donated a massive amount of engineering effort on their behalf to Linux and they're expected to reinvent their lives in a Linux-dev-compatible manner just to get the donation accepted? Couldn't someone from the Linux community have reached out to them and guided them through the process?
I'm speaking from experience here, years ago we had some open-source code that some group wanted us to migrate from our VCS to their VCS and then, if we invested all the time learning the other VCS and maintaining the code in it, they might actually consider looking at it at some point, and possibly even contributing some code to it. The term idi na hui hadn't come into common usage back then but that was roughly what we felt after a few months of being dicked around like this.
When a gift horse arrives, you don't shove a grenade up its arse and pull the pin.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Frosty Piss on Friday April 29 2022, @06:32AM (1 child)
If there are no competent devs who want to maintain this driver, perhaps that’s an indication that not many find it useful?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @06:44AM
There are a number of competent devs that would be interested, including Kari Argillander. This is just the first step of the process to replace one maintainer with another.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday April 29 2022, @04:02PM
At some point, certain categories become "good enough" for most people and are considered to be boring by most. File systems would seem to be such a thing. You might have a hard time attracting new people, but maybe there are some people who don't think that particular thing is boring and would like to contribute. Hold on, I know a guy who wrote file systems for Linux. Haven't heard from him for a while. Let me look him up... Oh my. Ohhhh.... my. Let me get back to you.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @04:03PM
i think the best way to get ntfs "support" is to share:everyone via lan, copy the ones and zeros to another disk with a sane filesystem (thank you samba and ext3/4) and then dd the ntfs formated one ...
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday April 29 2022, @05:32PM
This was always going to be a dump-and-run, it was obvious from the outset and there were LKML discussions and LWN.net articles highlighting exactly that at the time.
I know, because I just pulled them back up a few hours ago to show my colleague who was asking about it, because I'd said exactly the same at the time.
It was a single developer committing code, it took 27+ attempts to get it anywhere near right, and Paragon had zero real involvement or interest in maintaining it at any point.
The furore over its very inclusion and first patchset was that exactly this would happen and they weren't going to just accept it in its original state because it was unmaintainable and they couldn't see it ever receiving continuing support.
Shocked face quotient: Zero.