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

Kevin Lo kevlo at kevlo.org
Mon Feb 6 09:51:04 UTC 2012


On -28163/01/-9 03:59, 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.
Well, I think it's worth it. There is a known problem with exporting
a fuse mount using NFS, so you can't use fusefs-ntfs to mount ntfs
on one machine and then export that using NFS.
> How mature darwin implementation is?  Is there public
> source repository with history?
>
> attilio@ is working on MPSAFE NTFS:
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/NONMPSAFE_DEORBIT_VFS
     Kevin


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