PARAGON NTFS3 DRIVER

After years of having to make do with the NTFS-3g FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) driver to read and write to Windows NTFS volumes in Linux, a driver is finally coming to the kernel. Actually there has for a long time been a kernel driver (since 2001 in fact), but it only ever provided read-only support and was overlooked by most people. NTFS-3g was a valuable crutch for people who worked on dual-boot systems, but compared to native NTFS its performance was weak. On older systems in particular it would consume a lot of CPU cycles for the underwhelming rate at which it wrote bits.

The new kernel driver, dubbed NTFS3, comes from Paragon Software, a commercial provider of cross filesystem, partitioning and network management tools. NTFS has been around since 1993, and is of much less commercial interest than it once was. Microsoft has superceded it in new versions of Windows, so Paragon generously chose to open source it last year. This was a bit of a rocky road: Paragon’s first attempt to dump 27k lines of spaghetti code to the Kernel were met with a swift refusal. However, 22 tries and some community advice later, the code has finally landed in Kernel 5.15, which will be released by the time you read this.