[RFC] Remove NTFS kernel support

[John-Mark Gurney]

Nikolay Pavlov wrote this message on Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 20:52 +0200:
> On Thursday 07 February 2008 20:18:42 Joao Barros wrote:
> > On Feb 7, 2008 5:41 PM, Nikolay Pavlov <qpadla at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Thursday 07 February 2008 14:47:41 Eric Anderson wrote:
> > > > FUSE is slow, requires a port (unless PUFFS is ported, which I've
> > > > probed about before).
> > >
> > > I think this is not an argument:
> > > http://www.ntfs-3g.org/performance.html
> >
> > Eric has valid points.
> > How relevant is a benchmark on Linux to your argument?
> 
> But it's a userland application. This page is demonstration of it's 
> potential performance that could be achieved, but were is the FreeBSD NTFS 
> implementation stats? Let me ask you: compered to what FUSE is slow?     

Kernel NTFS support is about 10x faster than ntfs-3g on FreeBSD (I
think this also depends upon the size of the file).  This is because
ntfs-3g depends upon the block device that linux provides to userland.
There are patches that make ntfs-3g have it's own block cache that
makes it perform decently on FreeBSD, but until those patches are
integrated, using ntfs-3g is a non-starter if you use NTFS for >4GB
file support.  It's faster to use samba to a Windows box than it is
to use ntfs-3g to write large files.  (And that's even w/ how much
slower samba is that nfs.)

I don't have any hard core benchmarks handy.  Even on MacOSX ntfs-3g
is sooo slow.  It's so slow, that I don't even both hooking up NTFS
disks to my MacOSX box anymore either.

Though I will say that once ntfs-3g has decided that they want to
target other platforms than Linux and address these performance issues,
I will be one of the first asking for our current NTFS code to be
removed and replaced by ntfs-3g, but until that time, we need to keep
the current code.

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."