From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jul 11 11:29:21 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id LAA29606 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 11 Jul 1995 11:29:21 -0700 Received: from cs.weber.edu (cs.weber.edu [137.190.16.16]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id LAA29597 for ; Tue, 11 Jul 1995 11:29:19 -0700 Received: by cs.weber.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1.1) id AA17750; Tue, 11 Jul 95 12:22:02 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Message-Id: <9507111822.AA17750@cs.weber.edu> Subject: Re: ntfs To: cp_nairn@cc.utas.edu.au (Carey Nairn) Date: Tue, 11 Jul 95 12:22:01 MDT Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Carey Nairn" at Jul 11, 95 02:34:15 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4dev PL52] Sender: questions-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > 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.