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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I haven't messed with NTFS in years but from what I remember the Linux kernel driver was read-only, right? I assume this new one will allow write access?

I vaguely remember having to use fuse to write to NTFS partitions in the past.

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The existing kernel mode driver has a very limited write mode that is marked with flashing sirens and limited to things like (IIRC) "only modifying existing files without changing their size".

ntfs-3g is a FUSE driver with read/write support, but it's FUSE, and not bundled with the kernel.

This new driver is (based on?) the commercial NTFS driver Paragon sold, and does not suffer the limitations of either, AIUI, and I gather the objections have mostly been around the state of the code rather than functionality.

edit: Having looked, the comment in the Kconfig makes it clear that they believe the limited write support is quite limited, but quite safe.

The FUSE one (ntfs-3g) is fine - we use it for bulk editing Windows VMs when transferring them from VMware to KVM[1]. Unfortunately development has slowed to a standstill in the last few years. Which is a problem. At the moment it supports current Windows guests including relatively recent features like file compression, but we're only a MSFT new feature away from having to take over upstream development or look for an alternative. I doubt that an in-kernel driver will be noticably faster, but there's hope it might be more widely used and so better maintained.

[1] https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html

Sure, I didn't mean to suggest there was anything fundamentally flawed about ntfs-3g, I've used it to basically universal success after the first year or two after it was released, just that it is FUSE, which means there's always going to be some overhead involved that wouldn't be present in an in-kernel driver (though they keep trimming away at how much that has to be).

https://jp-andre.pagesperso-orange.fr/changelog.html doesn't seem totally dead, though the github repo hasn't seen much since March (but I don't think "since March" is what you meant by "last few years").

I am not 100% sure, but I think write support for NTFS has been a thing for at least 10 years. At least with the ntfs-3g FUSE driver.

I used NTFS with linux a year ago. It's read-write and suitable if you need to access files on Windows partition. It was OK but not great: I used it to share media files between Windows and Linux and soon I noticed that if I'm playing mp3s from NTFS partition a lot of CPU used.

I remember writing to NTFS from linux 4 years ago.

But you were probably using NTFS-3G, which is a FUSE driver and not a kernal driver.

RW support has been an 'experimental' feature for a long time; some distros have enabled it by default for more than a decade at this point.

It's also extremely slow.

I am currently able to read and write. I never installed anything and I'm using Manjaro.

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