Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:16:02 +0700 From: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@nsu.ru> To: fs@freebsd.org Subject: Call for msdosfs/ntfs experts (or better, maintainers) Message-ID: <20111013181602.GA35354@regency.nsu.ru>
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Hello there,
For quite a while already, our FAT and NTFS support need some love to
shine on them, I believe. AFAICT, they currently have no maintainers
and thus are not receiving proper care.
Case 1. FreeBSD still has problems with UTF-8 locale and correct
handling of e.g. Chinese characters in both filesystems. Patches were
worked out to address this problem; they are available here:
http://deadshot.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/freebsd-patch/filesystem/
PR kern/133174 was filed on 29 Mar 2009 with the original patch for
msdosfs, which I've cleaned up a bit per style(9). No action was taken
since then.
I've contacted the original author of these patches. He's very
collaborative and is eager to provide all the guidance required to
review and include these changes in our code base. Any takers? It's
a shame for us not to be on par with Apple and even OpenBSD/NetBSD (as
I've been told, they support UTF-8 out of the box).
Case 2. Apparently, Apple actually released their NTFS implementation
under BSD license which seems quite worthy to take a look at:
http://opensource.apple.com/source/ntfs/ntfs-78/kext/
Not the userland part (open source but under APSL only) but perhaps we
don't really care about these parts since they are mostly mount utilities
and are trivial to rewrite from scratch (quoting delphij@).
Are there plans to make at least some use of this code? Our NTFS
implementation right now loses considerably to other Unixen, and since
its original author and de-jure maintainer is long gone from FreeBSD, we
should do something about it.
Not being a FS hacker myself, is there anything I can do to expedite the
progress on these issues (apart from becoming one)?
./danfe
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