Linux 7.1 Will Have an Optional New NTFS Driver
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software:
The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver.
Now that kernel 7.0 is out, the all-seeing Eye of Torvalds has shifted its gaze to the future kernel 7.1, which is likely to appear in a couple of months. One standout feature has already been merged: a new in-kernel read-write driver for Windows' default disk format, NTFS. Linus referred to it as the ntfs resurrection from Namjae Jeon. Some of the more excitable Linux blogs are getting breathless about this - but in our humble opinion, they're missing the real message.
This will not represent a massive shift in performance or anything like that. The existing in-kernel NTFS support is quite quick already. The real lesson to take from this is about clean, maintainable, thoroughly commented code, which means that one developer can take it over from another even decades later.
The Reg FOSS desk described the driver in October 2025, and we recapped its history back then. It's from Korean developer Namjae Jeon, formerly of Samsung but now working with Samba. He's on his way to being one of the Linux filesystem gurus: as we reported in 2022, back then he contributed the code to allow Linux to fix corrupted exFAT volumes, which we are sure by now has saved the data of many users of large flash storage media.
This isnot ahuge new Linux feature. As this archived copy of the Linux-NTFS Project web page shows, Linux got the ability to read NTFS volumes with kernel 2.1.74 in 1997. Just over a decade later, that was joined by the FUSE NTFS-3G driver, which is sponsored by Tuxera. Because it runs as a user-mode program, not inside the kernel, NTFS-3G isn't as fast and is a little more limited: you can't boot from it, for instance.
That changed in 2021, when Paragon Software donated a new read-write GPL NTFS driver to the kernel. After considerableeffort and discussion, that made it into kernel 5.15 shortly before this vulture joined The Register team. Donating a large and complex driver to the Linux kernel isn't a one-off project, though: it needs to be constantly maintained, and within some six months, this started to become a problem.
Around that time, Namjae started work on modernizing the original 1990s read-only NTFS driver, adding write support as well as revising it to use modern kernel filesystem handling features such as large folios.
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