Fully Open Source NTFS Support Under Linux

lord_rob the only on writes "The Linux NTFS project has released a beta version of its fully open source userspace (using FUSE) 3G-Linux NTFS support driver. According to the developer, this driver beats hands down other NTFS support solutions performance-wise (including commercial Paragon NTFS driver and also Captive NTFS, which is using windows ntfs.sys driver under WINE)." That's right, writing to NTFS even works. Soon it'll mean one less recovery disk to keep around, I hope.

Comments

Great news.

[LinuxGeek]

This gives us another tool that can be used to repair windows systems that have been hit by some of the newest rootkits that can hide from detection when windows is running. Can't hide from a Linux boot disk and with complete write support, now these can be cleaned and studied more effectively.

Re:Great news.

[Thing 1]

You also can't hide from a different installation of Windows that has the infected disk mounted. Rootkits hide themselves by hooking into the running kernel/fs drivers - inspect the disk with a clean install and they can't hide then either.

Interesting approach: install VMware Server (free), install Windows into a VM (free if you have 2003--IIRC*, Microsoft allows 4 instances, 1 host and 3 virtual), then connect the physical drive to the VM. Not sure whether VMware will bypass the drivers and allow you complete physical access as I haven't tried it but that's one of the options when creating a new virtual hard drive.

You probably don't want to run the VM from the same drive that you attach to it, though... I haven't tested this, but it might be a nice option for investigating without taking down any services that may happen to be running on the potentially-infected PC.

* -- is this the sound made by a crashing car?

Performance

[Reality Master 101]

Unless I missed it, I notice the performance numbers are only single process. I'm suspicious of this because user-mode filesystems (as under microkernel operation systems) typically crash and burn performance-wise under simultaneous load, not under single-user use.

I know that user-mode is easier to debug, but they really should turn this into a kernel module.

Re:Performance

[ArbitraryConstant]

While an NTFS kernel module with awesome performance would be nice, we haven't even had reliable writing before this (not without the Windows NTFS driver). It wasn't just a lack of performance, it was so bad that you'd need to do stuff like keep an FAT32 partition for transferring files. You won't run your high-traffic website on this, but it is still extremely helpful.

For the purposes of making a dual-boot system less painful, it's great. Now all we need is a Windows driver for Reiser...

Re:Performance

[Reality Master 101]

Look at the keyword "fundamental" here, THAT's the myth and the fact that several people, AST being one of them, have proven that there is no such "fundamental" difference is the "fact" here.

AST himself said at the site the poster above linked to, "In this paper we argue that for most computer users, reliability is more important than performance and discuss four current research projects striving to improve operating system reliability."

If performance is exactly the same or better than monolithic kernels, as you claim, why would AST make an issue that reliability is more important than it, unless performance WAS an issue? Why wouldn't he write a paper titled, "Having your cake and eating it too... better performance AND better reliability. Why microkernels have won the war."

The answer is because they AREN'T and NEVER will be for general purposes. Sure, you can find isolated tests or isolated projects where they might do better (and the cost of doing better is generally insane complexity), but it's just foolish to argue that they're anywhere close in performance in the general case.

Look, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show me the big database servers running on microkernels. Show me the big web servers. Show me big mail servers. And show me how the performance compares to the monolithic kernel operating system on the same hardware.

Sure, microkernels "work", but who cares? I can get DOS to "work". Show me something that works *better*. Or to put it another way, when microkernels are truly better, you won't need to sell everyone, they'll sell themselves. So far, they haven't for general purpose operating systems that care about performance.

FUSE is too slow

[caseih]

The latest knoppix CD uses an older version of this NTFS driver (read-only if I'm not mistaken) via FUSE and it is *slow*. Rsyncing an entire disk for backup purposes can take days (yes days). Disabling the fuse-ntfs system in knoppix and mounting using the read-only NTFS kernel-level driver is several orders of magnitude faster. So I think this driver is good for sharing data and doing emergency stuff, but it is no where near fast enough to think about using it as a root file system or anything. Knowing this latest driver is faster than Paragon's driver is good news; paragon's driver must have been even slower.

When the ntfs driver is stable, I hope it will be put in the kernel (at least as a native file system). Then we can consider adding a unix layer on it and install linux to the same drive as Windows, for those that want to dual-boot.

Re:Yay

[julesh]

Random aside:

NTFS was actually launched in 1993, 13 years ago, when Windows NT 3.1 (really 1.0, but the version was matched to the MS-DOS-based Windows 3.1) was released.

It's interesting to note that this means XP (which identifies itself internally as NT 5.1) is actually NT release 3.1.

3.1 is typically the best version of any microsoft product (except DOS; 3.3 was generally regarded as better). Version 4 (e.g. Win95, DOS 4.00, ...) is often a complete flop, frequently requiring a quick followup release (W95OSR2, DOS 4.01) to rectify serious problems with it. At this point consumers start to lose cofidence and MS look for a new direction in order to convince people that their software isn't all that bad.

So, when Vista flops, what are MS going to replace it with?