NTFS Support For OpenBSD

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."

Re:NTFS support would help everyone.

[evilviper]

No, you've got that backwards. Having UFS support on Windows would be one less way for Microsoft to lock-in their customers. This way just means that more people are likely to use NTFS on their removable disks, rather than some better format, like UFS.

UFS, AFAIK, is supported by every-reasonably-popular-operating-system-on-the-p lanet, except Windows.

One good thing about our current point in time is that Windows users have to choose between the widely compatible FAT32, with it's maximum filesystem size of 32GB, or to use a Microsoft-only filesystem like NTFS. I had hoped this would lead some Windows programmer to write a UFS driver for Windows, but instead it looks like it'll be the same old thing... Microsoft creating utter crap, and everyone imitating them, just to be compatible.

Re:NTFS is hardly crap.

[irgu]

Hey, what's the point of journaling if you are just going to run chkdsk/fsck everytime, anyhow?

First good point. And apparently the only one.

Well, if you are forced to defrag it all the time, that *really* ruins your performance, which defeats the point.

I'm not forced because I don't use NTFS :P But I can't see what's the big deal running it once a day in the background automatically. People do it and they are happy with it. And others whining.

Now you are mixing up the filesystem and the operating system... The filesystem doesn't do the encryption, the software on top of the filesystem does.

Check the NTFS documentation [sourceforge.net]. Encryption is part of the filesystem.

Saying OSes other than Windows don't typically have reasonably transparent file encryption has nothing to do with the filesystem itself.

I never told this. Check out again what I wrote.

Besides, I would never talk about a distro "out of the box". It's a horrible baseline to use. There are many things that distros don't do "out of the box" that are very easy for an admin to do.

Majority of the computer users aren't admins.

I gave much more detailed info in my reply to his vague assertions, so how does that make you think he knows what he's talking about, and I don't? The only obvious answer is that you promote NTFS yourself, and since he agrees with your opinions, that *must* mean he is knowledgable ...

If I were to promote a filesystem [sgi.com] then that wouldn't be NTFS. But NTFS is better, much more feature rich then most of the Unix ones, you like it or or not (personally I don't care much). But let's see what sethadam1 wrote: "NTFS is a modern, mature, stable, fully journalled file system".

Modern: definitely, at least compared to most Unix filesystems. It support most or all of their features *plus* compression, encryption, all power of 2 block sizes between 512 and 64 KB, nanosec timestamps, undelete on filesystem level, file forks, ACL's, extended attributes, UTF-8, indexing, etc.

Mature: one should look through its evolution how much it improved over the last 10 years

Stable: how would it work otherwise for several hundred million users?

Fully journalled: that's not true. Only metadata is journaled.