Stable NTFS-3G 2009.1.1 released

Stable NTFS-3G 2009.1.1 released

[Szabolcs Szakacsits]

Happy New Year 2009!

  *  Year 2008 Results
  *  Year 2009 Goals
  *  New Version Numbering
  *  Stable Release: UTF-8 Support, Fixes
  *  Acknowledgements

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By revisiting our plans for 2008, it seems we can happily state that we 
could achieve significantly more than what we have originally aimed for. 
Thank to all those who provided feedback, bug report, solution, testing, 
development, packaging, documentation, news, sponsorship, operational or 
other contribution. Just in the last two years more than 235 people 
contributed directly to the open source NTFS development!

Some of the main results, without completeness. 

  *  Full core functionality implemented: full index operations, unlimited 
     file and directory creation and transparent UTF-8 support. Moreover 
     shared writable mmap and NFS support via the FUSE kernel module.

  *  Lightweight, integrated FUSE: easier deployment, faster release cycles, 
     smaller footprint, less external dependencies.

  *  New, modern build system.

  *  Strong resistance to file system corruptions and hardware flaws.

  *  POSIX file system test suite ported, extended and maintained.
     http://ntfs-3g.org/pjd-fstest.html

  *  Advanced NTFS-3G: full ownership, permissions, POSIX ACL, junction
     points support, access to internal NTFS data, POSIX compliance.
     http://pagesperso-orange.fr/b.andre/advanced-ntfs-3g.html

  *  Significant performance improvements.

  *  High-performance NTFS-3G driver for embedded devices.
     http://ntfs-3g.org/commercial.html

  *  Solaris and Windows(!) port.

  *  Much improved Mac OS X integration 
     http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

More than 200 Linux distributions use NTFS-3G, and probably even more ISVs 
and consumer electronic device makers built it into one or more of their 
products.

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What to expect from 2009? 

Better usability, more functionality, better availability (online 
recovery), much better performance, modular architecture, smaller 
memory footprint. Improved integration on Mac OS X, more mature 
operation on the newer OSes.

Probably other things too if __YOU__ tell us what you would like to 
see to get improved or implemented.

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We have a new version numbering convention. The version formats will be 
either

  year.month

or

  year.month.patchlevel

It is backward compatible, so we hope it will not cause any trouble. 
If so then please let us know.

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Potentially inaccessible files with national characters in the filename, 
missing, disappeared files and directories were one of the major problems 
for NTFS-3G users if the user's language and region identifiers weren't 
setup properly. The workaround was complex, unfriendly, distribution 
specific and didn't even help if multiply languages were used.

Bernhard Kaindl has developed a solution which is included in this release 
candidate. Jean-Pierre Andre improved on it. It's in testing since several 
months with success and it doesn't require anymore the 'locale=' mount 
option to be set.

The 'locale=' mount option is ignored for filename characterset conversions 
and always UTF-8 is used.

In the past, unreadable filenames were ignored from a directory list. 
Since this shouldn't happen anymore thus a directory read error is 
reported in such cases. Unexpected NTFS-3G errors are always logged in 
one of the /var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, /var/log/messages.log, 
or /var/log/daemon.log files.

The operating system, of course, still has to have UTF-8 support to 
properly display all national characters. The big difference is, from 
now on no filenames must be hidden and inaccessible on NTFS.

Having garbled filenames, filenames with question marks suggest a 
displaying, not file system driver problem. The 'ls' command has 
a -b (or --escape) option which prints the octal escapes for 
undisplayable characters.

This release implemented file creation timestamp support on OS X and 
contains some additional fixes which are listed in detail at

  http://ntfs-3g.org/releases.html

The source code of the latest stable driver is available at 

  http://ntfs-3g.org/

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Many thanks to: Jean-Pierre Andre, Bernhard Kaindl, Erik Larsson, 
Miklos Szeredi, Dominique L Bouix, Csaba Henk, Alejandro Pulver, 
Ralph Martin, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Matthew Zhang, Michael Clark,
Amit Singh, ...

	The NTFS-3G Team

Re: Stable NTFS-3G 2009.1.1 released

[Jamie Lokier]

Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:
>   *  Significant performance improvements.

I've read that NTFS-3g performs well, which is really good news.

>   *  High-performance NTFS-3G driver for embedded devices.
>      http://ntfs-3g.org/commercial.html

That page say the commercial version has "10-20 times better performance".

Does it mean the GPL version is 10-20 times slower than it would be
with some performance optimisations, and do you have plans for those
optimisations make their way into the GPL version eventually?

Thanks muchly,
-- Jamie

Re: Stable NTFS-3G 2009.1.1 released

[Szabolcs Szakacsits]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2009, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:
> >   *  Significant performance improvements.
> 
> I've read that NTFS-3g performs well, which is really good news.

These are the latest compilebench results (zfs-fuse needs a public patch, 
or turning on FUSE attribute caching and big write support):

                     Runtime (s)      MB/s
                     -----------     -----
  btrfs, no dup          168         51.42
  btrfs                  197         42.67
  ext4                   245         35.63
  ntfs-3g opti           370         21.41
  zfs-fuse opti          459         16.40
  ext3                   559         19.92
  xfs nobarrier          562         14.17
  reiserfs               595         13.11
  zfs-fuse               614         12.47
  ntfs-3g               2022          4.03
  nilfs2                3719         12.06
  xfs                   3786          1.95

> >   *  High-performance NTFS-3G driver for embedded devices.
> >      http://ntfs-3g.org/commercial.html
> 
> That page say the commercial version has "10-20 times better performance".
> 
> Does it mean the GPL version is 10-20 times slower than it would be
> with some performance optimisations, 

More like 3-20 times. It really depends on the workload and plenty of other 
things.

> and do you have plans for those optimisations make their way into the GPL 
> version eventually?

Sure, everything is being released under the GPL either at the same time 
or a bit later.

	Szaka

--
NTFS-3G:  http://ntfs-3g.org