[RFC] Remove NTFS kernel support

[Joao Barros]

On Feb 7, 2008 5:20 PM, Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Attilio Rao wrote:
>
> > 2008/2/7, Andre Oppermann <andre at freebsd.org>:
> >
> >> Eric Anderson wrote:
> >>> I think Alfred's point is really interesting.  How many people that don't
> >>> use it that say 'axe it' does it take to override 1 person saying 'keep
> >>> it!'?
> >>
> >> The real question is how many people does it take to say 'I'll maintain
> >> it'?  Just one.  Without it, it will only bitrot as evidenced by Attilios
> >> question.  NTFS is currently broken, just not as obvious because WITNESS
> >> didn't track and enforce lockmgr locks.
> >
> > Andre catched exactly my point. The big problem is that we have a list of
> > several unmaintained fs. NTFS is in this list. The support is not reliable,
> > it is only available in read mode and eventually bugged. I'm not sure I want
> > to keep this if nobody wants to maintain it.
>
> If you axe write support, does the maintainability of the kernel ntfs get
> easier?  As I understand it, the write support is rather limited, and

If I recall correctly ntfs volumes are mounted readonly by default
(I'm unable to verify now).

> debugging and fixing read support is generally a lot easier for a variety of
> reasons.  There's also a lot less risk to data. :-)  I think it's reasonable
> to surmise that, given our rather limited write support currently, the kernel
> ntfs code is used for data migration and limited sharing to FreeBSD in various
> forms, but that msdofs remains the general data transport of choice...

With this in mind, I used FAT32, but occasional Windows crashes lead
to some filesystem corruption and time consuming fsck. I converted the
fs to ntfs and had no more issues.
General data transport of choice for usb pens, external disks, iPods,
and when you need the ability to read/write it everywhere, but for
running Windows it's not the best choice when compared to ntfs.

If you think of it, FAT32 is the best supported (r/w) fs (on disk) by
all platforms: Windows, FreeBSD, OS X, Linux.
Having read the news today about the corporate support OpenID got, I
dream of a *good* universally supported fs. But I digress =)

>
> Robert N M Watson
> Computer Laboratory
> University of Cambridge

-- 
Joao Barros