Date: Tue, 11 Jul 95 12:22:01 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: cp_nairn@cc.utas.edu.au (Carey Nairn) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ntfs Message-ID: <9507111822.AA17750@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950711143306.17345B-100000@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au> from "Carey Nairn" at Jul 11, 95 02:34:15 pm
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> just a quick one... > > are there any plans to support ntfs in future versions of FreeBSD ?? There is read-only NTFS support from a German site already. You will have to check the hackers list archive on www.freebsd.org for details. >From an architectural standpoint, NTFS has a number of serious drawbacks. It also has some serious issues of feature inaccessability given a POSIX API for access. The use of Unicode for internal storage is a good thing. The fact that FreeBSD (and UNIX in general) uses NULL termination instead of byte count prefixing for puching strings across the user/kernel boundry is a problem. The support for DOS file names and the inability to use a name space switch mechanism in UNIX is a problem. The inability to access the resource/extended attribute mechanism with a change to several system call interfaces is a proble. The volume spanning is crude, and the way it is done effectively halves the MTBF for your disk array; RAID would have been a better choice. In general, NTFS has a number of good ideas that people in FS research (like me) have known about for years, but it lacks from an implementation standpoint some of the necessary add-ons to support these features and is not a good design for a general purpose UNIX file system. Probably it will have to be supported (there is a read-only HPFS as well) for reasons of compatability and dual install (probably why you asked about it in the first place), but it's not much of a win for a UNIX environment in general. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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