FREIBURG, Germany – November 4, 2021
It took numerous patches and over a year of hard work to address the tricky (and sometimes contradictory) concerns of Linux Kernel community members and to convince Maintainers that NTFS3 is good enough to become part of the Linux Kernel. Paragon Software proudly rose to meet the challenge, even though it took far more effort than initially planned. The size of the Linux Kernel community and the depth of its expertise led to far more sophisticated requirements for NTFS3 than Paragon Software had ever faced in its two decades of developing commercial file system implementations.
In 2019, Paragon Software decided to add a commercial-grade, open-source NTFS implementation to the Linux Kernel. Paragon Software developed its original commercial NTFS implementation back in 2000 as NTFS for DOS. Since then, thousands of commercial customers have licensed it for use in embedded, mobile, automotive, storage, and autonomous industrial devices. Paragon’s commercial implementation has historically been written in C++ and does not load into a Linux Kernel. Thus, NTFS3 was developed from scratch in pure C language and is entirely new code. To ensure commercial-grade quality of the code, Paragon Software has used its proprietary quality assurance process for commercial file system implementations. Today, this QA process includes over 160,000 tests developed over the last two decades to ensure the quality of commercial products delivered to Licensees of Paragon’s commercial NTFS implementations.
Paragon Software believes that a proper implementation of NTFS in the Linux Kernel is long overdue, especially after Microsoft’s decision to release the exFAT specifications and allow Open Invention Network (OIN) members to use exFAT in Linux. To date, no one has been able to develop a native and robust open-source NTFS implementation for the Linux Kernel with full read/write support. NTFS3 is Paragon’s gift to the Linux ecosystem, created to take Linux to the next level by enabling easy interoperability with a wider range of Windows environments.
On the business side, most commercial customers require dedicated 24/7 support, detailed performance and memory fine-tuning, very specific compliance with hardware requirements, and sophisticated legal compliance. However, these requirements do not co-exist with the GPL nature of an open-source community. Therefore, commercial customers will remain focused on Paragon’s commercial implementation, leaving NTFS3 to be used by the general public in cases where requirements are less strict. Ironically, for many commercial cases, NTFS is actually not the best file system choice. These days, NTFS is more of a legacy file system, which is why more and more commercial customers are using Paragon’s own file system – Paragon FS.
As a Maintainer of the NTFS3 code, Paragon Software is committed to ensuring that every new version of Linux Kernel with NTFS3 support passes Paragon’s same internal quality assurance process used for its commercial file system implementations. This QA process includes new bugs/issues and grows over time. Paragon’s quality assurance process for commercial file system implementations currently includes over 160,000 tests, such as smoke tests, performance tests, load tests, and long-term endurance crash and stress tests.
Paragon Software plans to open source its mkfs.NTFS utility and may choose to open source more utilities in the near future to make the use of NTFS under Linux easier.
More questions and answers related to the inclusion of NTF3 into a Linux Kernel, as well as a detailed comparison of various NTFS implementations for Linux, can be found on Paragon Software’s website.