From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 13 19:14:02 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A0F9E106566C for ; Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:14:02 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from danfe@regency.nsu.ru) Received: from mx.nsu.ru (r2b9.nsu.ru [212.192.164.39]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A2088FC13 for ; Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:14:01 +0000 (UTC) Received: from regency.nsu.ru ([193.124.210.26]) by mx.nsu.ru with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1REPnV-00089L-J8 for fs@freebsd.org; Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:14:25 +0700 Received: from regency.nsu.ru (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by regency.nsu.ru (8.14.2/8.14.2) with ESMTP id p9DIGOc0046187 for ; Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:16:24 +0700 (NOVST) (envelope-from danfe@regency.nsu.ru) Received: (from danfe@localhost) by regency.nsu.ru (8.14.2/8.14.2/Submit) id p9DIG3Sh046039 for fs@freebsd.org; Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:16:03 +0700 (NOVST) (envelope-from danfe) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:16:02 +0700 From: Alexey Dokuchaev To: fs@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20111013181602.GA35354@regency.nsu.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Cc: Subject: Call for msdosfs/ntfs experts (or better, maintainers) X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:14:02 -0000 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