NTFS GSoC Project Idea

[Gleb Kurtsou]

On (26/03/2012 21:13), Efstratios Karatzas wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I am a FreeBSD GSoC 2010 student, looking to participate in this years
> GSoC. The project that I wish to work on is the FreeBSD NTFS driver.
> 
> I 've already discussed my project idea with Attilio@ who suggested that I
> forward my proposal to the hackers mailing list in order to get more
> feedback and see if there's anyone interested in mentoring a NTFS project.
> 
> The current draft of the technical part of my proposal(pdf & plain text)
> can be found here:
> 
> http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~std06101/ntfs/ntfs_proposal.tar
> 
> The project idea focuses on mp-safing the NTFS driver as well as adding
> extra write support. I've tried to merge the two conflicting NTFS project
> ideas in the ideas wiki page, into one. One of them suggesting that work
> should be done on the current driver (mp-safe it etc) and the other one
> suggesting that we port Apple's NTFS driver from scratch. The concept is
> that we keep most of our vnode/vfs code (i.e. ntfs_vfsops.c, ntfs_vnops.c)
> and rework existing infrastructure as needed as well as implement new
> features using Apple's driver as a guide.

I'm not sure I follow your idea, but I'd suggest sticking to a single
project: either improve FreeBSD NTFS or do the port. FreeBSD and Darwin
ntfs implementations are completely unrelated thus porting features from
Darwin won't be easy.

> This way, we avoid the major
> changes in Apple's VFS (is there any documentation to be found?) and port
> code that won't break current functionality.

I bet "major changes in Apple's VFS" are easier to deal with than
"merging" two unrelated file systems. XNU VFS is based on FreeBSD 5 VFS
and they still share a lot in common, e.g. vnode operations themselves
are nearly the same, e.g. extended attributes, locking, buffer cache are
different.

Take a look at HFS+ port. It's unmaintained and outdated but page
contains link to CVS repository snapshot.
http://people.freebsd.org/~yar/hfs/

> I tried to keep this e-mail brief so If you wish to know more, please refer
> to the proposal.
> 
> Thank you
> 
> -- 
> 
> Efstratios "GPF" Karatzas