On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Bob Sanders wrote:
> NTFS is a variation of VAX/VMS' original filesystem. Internally at
> DEC it was known as ODS2 (On Disk Structure 2).
This is quite interesting but are you sure? It's fairly well known that
NTFS was derived from HPFS. Of course this doesn't exclude that HPFS could
be a variant of ODS2.
> NTFS is a simplified version of this, keeping the ACL and journaling
> abilites while eliminating some of the more useful (IMO) features -
> auto-versioning.
I also think auto versioning is quite useful what unfortunately neither
the major Linux filesystems nor NTFS have.
I'm not familiar with ODS2 features but NTFS development didn't stop 15 or
so years ago and new features were added or readded, at least based on the
feature sets of the different NTFS versions. For example per file-,
directory- or volume based compression and encryption, unicode support,
built-in undelete (only ext2 has on Linux), sparse files, quota, streams,
nanosec resolution timestamps, ...
> As to comparing it...NTFS is a robust filesystem, but it's not usable
> under Linux...well fully usable.
Yep, it's not fully usable but not really because of the widespread
beliefs.
There are some myths about Linux NTFS support (like it's experimental,
corrupts data, etc) even if they aren't true for about 3-4 years. The fact
is read is fully usable and write isn't fully implemented yet. This means
that the write code either isn't written yet, disabled or works fine.
The complexity of NTFS is comparable to XFS or Reiser4 what is worked on
about 8+ developers full time, paid. The Linux NTFS kernel driver
currently is developed by one guy voluntarily, in his spare time.
Also note that there are two completely different kernel drivers and the
write support was disabled long ago for the original, NT4 NTFS driver that
indeed corrupted a lot of Windows 2000 partitions because, among others,
the driver didn't check the NTFS version for backard compatibility.
Szaka
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