Call for msdosfs/ntfs experts (or better, maintainers)

Rick Macklem rmacklem at uoguelph.ca
Sat Oct 15 00:42:15 UTC 2011


Gleb Kurtsou wrote:
> On (14/10/2011 01:16), Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> > Hello there,
> >
> > For quite a while already, our FAT and NTFS support need some love
> > to
> > shine on them, I believe. AFAICT, they currently have no maintainers
> > and thus are not receiving proper care.
> >
> > Case 1. FreeBSD still has problems with UTF-8 locale and correct
> > handling of e.g. Chinese characters in both filesystems. Patches
> > were
> > worked out to address this problem; they are available here:
> >
> >     http://deadshot.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/freebsd-patch/filesystem/
> >
> > PR kern/133174 was filed on 29 Mar 2009 with the original patch for
> > msdosfs, which I've cleaned up a bit per style(9). No action was
> > taken
> > since then.
> >
> > I've contacted the original author of these patches. He's very
> > collaborative and is eager to provide all the guidance required to
> > review and include these changes in our code base. Any takers? It's
> > a shame for us not to be on par with Apple and even OpenBSD/NetBSD
> > (as
> > I've been told, they support UTF-8 out of the box).
> >
> > Case 2. Apparently, Apple actually released their NTFS
> > implementation
> > under BSD license which seems quite worthy to take a look at:
> >
> >     http://opensource.apple.com/source/ntfs/ntfs-78/kext/
> Sounds very interesting. I'd peek it up and do a FreeBSD port, but I
> won't be able to start at least in two months. I've just started
> reviewing and testing this year FUSE GSoC project. It works quite ok
> for
> me (ntfs, encfs), no more random panics etc. But I was told it
> somewhat
> reduces number of supported file systems. I'm going to publish it on
> github soon.
> 
> Question remains if it's worth doing the port from darwin if we have
> working fuse ntfs. How mature darwin implementation is? Is there
> public
> source repository with history?
> 
Just fyi, in case you haven't looked, the Mac OS X VFS/VOP interface
is quite different from FreeBSD's these days, so the port won't be trivial.
(The VFS/VOP diverged mostly during the Panther->Tiger era, so if it was
 stable in Panther with the BSD license, that might be the place to start.
 The Panther kernel sources are xnu-5nn, but I have no idea if there is a
 BSD licensed ntfs in the tarball.)

As far as I know, there are no public repos from Apple. All there is are
source tarballs that correspond to the production releases. However, it
can't hurt to check in case ntfs is an exception?

rick
> attilio@ is working on MPSAFE NTFS:
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/NONMPSAFE_DEORBIT_VFS
> 
> >
> > Not the userland part (open source but under APSL only) but perhaps
> > we
> > don't really care about these parts since they are mostly mount
> > utilities
> > and are trivial to rewrite from scratch (quoting delphij@).
> >
> > Are there plans to make at least some use of this code? Our NTFS
> > implementation right now loses considerably to other Unixen, and
> > since
> > its original author and de-jure maintainer is long gone from
> > FreeBSD, we
> > should do something about it.
> >
> > Not being a FS hacker myself, is there anything I can do to expedite
> > the
> > progress on these issues (apart from becoming one)?
> >
> > ./danfe
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