Paragon's NTFS Driver For The Linux Kernel Spun Up A 27th Time

Those having to deal with data stored on NTFS partitions from Linux have been eagerly awaiting the "NTFS3" kernel driver that Paragon Software has been working now for a year to upstream into the Linux kernel. No pull request has been sent in yet but the twenty-seventh spin of this driver was published today.

The NTFS3 driver from Paragon was previously supported commercially by the company but they have been working vigorously now to get the driver mainlined and with a promise to maintain it moving forward. This NTFS3 driver is better than the existing in-tree kernel driver with more reliable read-write support and other features not found there and also being in better shape than the FUSE-based NTFS driver. With the better feature-set and performance, this new driver is of interest to those having to interact with this Microsoft file-system.

With today's "v27" patches of NTFS3 there are some basic code changes --- replacing of iov_iter_copy_from_user_atomic() with using copy_page_from_iter_atomic().

The v27 patches can be found on the mailing list. So far the upstream feedback to this latest series is inquiring about the QA/testing facilitated by Paragon Software engineers and separately suggesting that NTFS3 look at supporting iomap but that is not necessarily a blocker for initial mainlining.

Linus Torvalds recently called on Paragon to send in the NTFS3 pull request if they are indeed stepping up to the plate and it's ready. We'll see if this new NTFS driver could potentially be mainlined in about one month's time during the Linux 5.15 merge window.