NTFS in GENERIC: opt-in or opt-out?

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, Luigi Rizzo wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 11:25:14PM -0800, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
>>
>> I am reviewing differences between amd64 and i386 GENERIC kernels and 
>> noticed that for some unclear reason we ship amd64 GENERIC with NTFS module 
>> compiled in, while i386 without it. IMHO both should match. The question is 
>> whether NTFS should be i386 way (opt in) or amd64 way (opt out) in GENERIC? 
>> What do people think?
>
> given that the sysutils/fusefs-ntfs seems to be much better, I'd rather 
> remove the in-kernel ntfs from both and replace with a note on what to do to 
> use fusefs-ntfs

There was a long thread on this topic on arch@, maybe 6 months ago, in which 
it was concluded that:

(1) fusefs is fairly (quite) unstable if used intensively
(2) our kernel ntfs code is much faster for read-only operation

I doubt either of these has changed significantly in that time, but I'm 
willing to be surprised.  I watched my office-mate here at the CL suffer 
through the fuse/ntfs support on FreeBSD 7.x for several weeks before giving 
up and using UFS on his larger USB-attached storage.  He saw a range of panics 
in that time, all in fuse.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge