Last week saw [1]the "NTFS resurrection" as Linux Torvalds put it with [2]the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver.

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software today sent out a batch of new additions and bug fixes to that NTFS3 driver. Nothing too exciting but a number of different fixes and lower-level improvements:

"Added:

reject inodes with zero non-DOS link count

return folios from ntfs_lock_new_page()

subset of W=1 warnings for stricter checks

work around -Wmaybe-uninitialized warnings

buffer boundary checks to run_unpack()

terminate the cached volume label after UTF-8 conversion

Fixed:

check return value of indx_find to avoid infinite loop

prevent uninitialized lcn caused by zero len

increase CLIENT_REC name field size to prevent buffer overflow

missing run load for vcn0 in attr_data_get_block_locked()

memory leak in indx_create_allocate()

OOB write in attr_wof_frame_info()

mount failure on volumes with fragmented MFT bitmap

integer overflow in run_unpack() volume boundary check

validate rec->used in journal-replay file record check

Changed:

resolve compare function in public index APIs

$LXDEV xattr lookup

potential double iput on d_make_root() failure

initialize err in ni_allocate_da_blocks_locked()

correct the pre_alloc condition in attr_allocate_clusters()"

The full list of patches can be found via [3]this pull request . It will be interesting to do some head-to-head testing to see how the new NTFS driver stacks up in the real-world use against the existing NTFS3 driver that has largely stagnated since being mainlined.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-New-NTFS-Driver

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-NTFS-Driver-Submitted-Linux

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260420150756.6058-1-almaz.alexandrovich@paragon-software.com/