NTFS driver (was: ReactOS GPL vs. proprietary drivers)

[Steven Tower]

Reading data from a file system is much easier then writing.  It's kind
of like saying, I can extract the data from a database raw, but just
because I can do that doesn't mean I can take into account all the
undocumented nuances that I am ignoring to get the data in the first
place, that the original system will consider corrupt if I miss even one
bit in the proper place.

I can almost certainly extract data from most anything in a reasonable
time frame (not encrypted) but it takes hundreds of times longer to
figure out how to write that data in a manner that won't trigger a
issue.

Steven

On Tue, 2003-10-21 at 15:05, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Jan Kratochvil wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 17:41:19 +0200, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> > > 
> > > Why not? NTFS has all the features that other Linux filesystems have and
> > > even more. Why couldn't it be used as a standalone filesystem? 
> > 
> > As its data structures are undocumented. 
> 
> Lots of people spent lots of time many years ago to figure them out. There
> are at least 4-5 different ntfs implementations based on it. Most of them
> is read-only but if you know how to read, sure you can write as well. But
> due to the concurrenct access, it's much more difficult to implement.
> 
> > And it IMO does not make sense to fork its documented derivative out
> > of it (there was already one with unhappy end).
> 
> Sorry I don't get what you mean. The old NTFS driver? It didn't check the
> NTFS version so when Microsoft improved it slightly (Win2K) and thus
> updated its on-disk version number then the old driver tried to use it as
> an NT4 NTFS. Trivial driver bug. Unfortunately nobody fixed it for a very
> long time thus it ruined many people's filesystems. Thus because of the
> Linux driver bug Microsoft became even more evil, NTFS completely
> undocumented, later on the patent rumours added and etc.
> 
> The rewritten drivers and ntfsprogs check the NTFS version and exit if
> it's unknown.
> 
> BTW, it would be interesting if one could check, try out what's Longhorn's
> NTFS version numbers (i.e. if it changed or not). E.g. ntfsresize -i /device
> would tell it.
> 
> > > Let me tell an example, the (Linux) NTFS driver supports transparent
> > > compression.
> > 
> > OK, it is a feature missing in current GPLed (incl. specification)
> > filesystems. It still makes more sense to me implementing the feature
> > to existing GPL filesystem instead of implementing the same feature to
> > NTFS with uncertain data structures. 
> 
> It's not uncertain, it's know for a while. Moreover NTFS isn't only a new
> filesystem. It's also an important interoperability issue. Think about
> FAT. Is it good there are all over open source FAT drivers? It even made
> possible to quickly adopt to X-BOX's FATX. Soon FAT will go away
> completely, only NTFS stays. 
> 
> > But we are talking about free software - do what you get paid for.
> 
> I don't understand this. There are many reasons why people write open
> source software. Charity, bust ego, religion, fun, get paid, etc.
>  
> 	Szaka
> 
> 
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