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NTFS Support For OpenBSD

Posted by timothy on from the sacred-and-profane dept.

Dan writes "Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support."

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. NTFS is hardly crap. by sethadam1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    NTFS is a modern, mature, stable, fully journalled file system. It's got POSIX compliance, and it's got room built in for improvement. It also handles sparse files very nicely. In fact, even Windows NT 4 can use NTFS 3.1 (aka NTFS5) when upgraded to SP4 (ntfs.sys is replaced).

    Few people really know what they're talking about when they discuss NTFS. Did you know it supports hard linking? Did you know it's got a change journal? Did you know it can encrypt and decrypt files on the fly for instant access? NTFS pushes security, and part of security is security through obscurity. No one can boot Knoppix and overwrite your SAM - they can format the drive, but they can't CHANGE your system (presuming then, that you could always restore your data).

    Anyway, leave it to Slashdot to find some jerk who says NTFS is crap because it's a Microsoft product.

    I'm not saying NTFS is the end all of file systems, but don't trash it. It's a very nice product, and, unlike reiser, ext3, and UFS2, it's proven and widely deployed.

    More on NTFS

  2. hardly. by sethadam1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'll have to do some research. I don't believe for one second that there are more ext3 or resier deployments that NTFS. NTFS has been around since at least 1996 or earlier - virtually every Windows server runs it.

    I bet most Linux servers still use ext2. FreeBSD uses UFS. Novell uses NWFS. AIX uses JFS and IRIX uses XFS. reiser and ext3 are still babies comparitively.