[Linux-NTFS-Dev] Old vs new ntfs driver (was: [ANN] NTFS 2.1.3a ...)

[Szakacsits S. <sz...@si...>]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:

> NTFS 2.1.3a is now released for kernel 2.4.20.  This fixes all known
> problems with the driver.

Cool. Dave Jones maintains a popular and influental "2.[56] - what to
expect" document. NTFS changes are completely missing. As I mentioned in
one of my emails earlier, there are a lot of misunderstandings about the
state of NTFS support on Linux. IMHO it would be nice to clear it up a bit.

I tried to collect a short feature differences list between the old and new
drivers what we could submit for this document [and probably also update
linux-ntfs web pages and list what distros use the old vs new driver], e.g.

------------------------------------------------------------>
A new, rewritten NTFS driver got merged during 2.5. It has the
following main benefits over the old driver:
  - SMP and reentrant safe
  - support bigger than 4 kB cluster sizes
  - full support for sparse files on W2K/XP/W2K3
  - mmap() support
  - faster operations
  - read-only except safe file overwrite support
<------------------------------------------------------------

Please add your comments, fixes, enhancements then let's submit it.

	Szaka