Re: [PATCH 00/11] ntfsplus: ntfs filesystem remake

[Namjae Jeon]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 3:31 PM David Sterba <dsterba@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2025 at 11:07:38AM +0900, Namjae Jeon wrote:
> > The feature comparison summary
> > ==============================
> >
> > Feature                               ntfsplus   ntfs3
> > ===================================   ========   ===========
> > Write support                         Yes        Yes
> > iomap support                         Yes        No
> > No buffer head                        Yes        No
> > Public utilities(mkfs, fsck, etc.)    Yes        No
> > xfstests passed                       287        218
> > Idmapped mount                        Yes        No
> > Delayed allocation                    Yes        No
> > Bonnie++                              Pass       Fail
> > Journaling                            Planned    Inoperative
> > ===================================   ========   ===========
>
> Having two implementations of the same is problematic but I think what
> votes for ntfs+ is that it's using the current internal interfaces like
> iomap and no buffer heads. I'm not familiar with recent ntfs3
> development but it would be good to know if the API conversions are
> planned at all.
>
> There are many filesystems using the old interfaces and I think most of
> them will stay like that. The config options BUFFER_HEAD and FS_IOMAP
> make the distinction what people care about most. In case of ntfs it's
> clearly for interoperability.
>
> As a user I'd be interested in feature parity with ntfs3, eg. I don't
> see the label ioctls supported but it's a minor thing.
I can confirm that achieving full feature parity with ntfs3, including
the label ioctl support, in the next version.
Thanks for your feedback!


> Ideally there's
> one full featured implementation but I take it that it may not be
> feasible to update ntfs3 so it's equivalent to ntfs+. As this is not a
> native linux filesystem swapping the implementation can be fairly
> transparent, depending only on the config options. The drawback is
> losing the history of fixed bugs that may show up again.
>
> We could do the same as when ntfs3 appeared, but back then it had
> arguably better position as it brought full write support. Right now I
> understand it more of as maintenance problem.