The last month, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, made it known to Paragon Software that it should really submit a pull request for its read-write NTFS driver to be included in the awaited version 5.15 release, for which the merge window is still open at the time of writing this.
He pushed for the inclusion of Paragon’s NTFS3, saying that it will make working with NTFS systems much easier and, of importance to the security community, will make it easier for developers to sign software cryptographically.
Konstantin Komarov explained the current situation in the pull request last Friday:
This is the NTFS read-and-write driver. The current version is suitable for normal/compressed/sparse files and supports ACL and NTFS log playback. Most of the code has been in Linux since August 13 -next branch, but there are some patches, only a few days in the linux-next branch. Hope it is good-no regression was found in the test.
Konstantin Komarov, Paragon founder and CEO
However, Linus Torvalds criticized the use of GitHub merge in Paragon Softwareโs download request.
Thereโs one more thing I really do not want to see โ GitHub creates totally useless junk mergers, and you should never use GitHubโs interface for any merger โฆ GitHub is a fully capable host site, and it does several other things well, but mergers are not one of those things.
About Paragon’s NTFS Linux Driver
The existing Linux NTFS driver, whose implementation dates back to 2001, is basically unmaintained in the kernel and lacks proper write support and other features.
The NTFS-3G is another open-source implementation of Microsoft NTFS that includes read and write support, but itโs a filesystem in userspace (FUSE). The main drawback of this implementation is speed.
Paragon released its driver under the GNU General Public Licence last year. Before that, it was a proprietary driver and was sold commercially.
Compared with the existing FUSE-based open-source NTFS driver, Paragon’s NTFS3 driver undoubtedly wins in terms of functionality and performance. The driver fully supports reads and writes and many other features not found with the existing Linux driver.
In conclusion, Linux distributions should soon support the Windows NTFS file system better out of the box. If everything goes well, this NTFS3 driver will finally enter the mainstream version in Linux 5.15 by yearโs end.
