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Comment by yrro | Hacker News Reader

That sounds quite pleasant, but I wonder who is storing their home directories on NTFS?

I considered this in the past. Linux support for NTFS is much better than any of the mechanisms to read ext3/4/btrfs/etc on Windows/Mac. Your options for a Windows/Mac/Linux portable filesystem are basically exFAT or NTFS.

That said, now I use LUKS on Linux and Bitlocker on Windows, I've mostly just given up on a shared filesystem

How do the Linux-specific properties of files get stored on NTFS (e.g., file owner/group/mode?)

NTFS ACLs are much more powerful than Unix permissions. Just map users to users, groups to groups, and you're done.

How? ACL subjects are identified by SIDs not by UID/GID.

As I said, set up a mapping between users/groups and the corresponding notion in NTFS. An UID/GID will correspond to an SID and vice versa.

ntfs-3g (is that still how Linux machines are mounting NTFS read/write? it's been a while since I've done it) by default just doesn't do anything with the NTFS permissions and makes everything have a shared owner/group/mode as seen by Linux.

You can opt in to having it store Linux permissions in NTFS's ACLs, and there's an option to have a file that maps between Linux and Windows user IDs to allow for interoperability.

> is that still how Linux machines are mounting NTFS read/write

ntfs-3g is a FUSE based driver (and not much maintained anymore), Linux now has a fully featured kernel driver with ntfs3 - which is also what TFA is about.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ntfs3.htm...

Oh yes, of course, so it is (what the article is about). Oops.

Documentation for ntfs3 is a little thin on the ground.

I have not tried personally (have no Linux installed), but from docs it should be quite possible to mount your partition of Linux with WSL2. Google for "WSL mount".

May work on latest Windows 11 only though.

Does that mount the FS into the WSL2 VM or into the Windows host? I'm guessing it's the former

Yeah, but as WSL is exposed back to Windows, this should make it accessible too. Not tried myself though.

I guess nobody ATM, but if the support for NTFS becomes really good then why not use it as your root fs? It's truly battle hardened (the fs, not this particular implementation necessarily), and it is really nice to use an fs that is supported in both Linux and windows if you're dual booting.

Isn't NTFS incapable of caching as well or something due to extra layers of indirection, and that is why git is so slow (10-100X) on windows? Or is it another part of windows that slows it down?

(Edit: seems to be a combination https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425... )

"NTFS really isn't that bad" -- https://web.archive.org/web/https://lca2020.linux.org.au/sch...

NTFS has poor performance with lots of small files.

That's Windows VFS layer. If you bypass it and read disk structures directly it's wicked fast. There are many file tools that do it such as Everything and WizTree.

Real-time antivirus scanning likely doesn't help. Most Linux users are unlikely to have this running in the background.

NTFS has horrible small file performance, to the extent that if you are working on a project that has lots of small files (NodeJS for example) you can expect performance that is 2-3x worse than on other file systems.

Even unzipping archives with lots of small files takes forever, it is easy for a modern SSD to slow down to 5MB/s or less when trying to write out tons of small files to an NTFS partition.

NTFS is old and stable, but it is not fast by modern standards.

That's a limitation of Windows' VFS rather than NTFS disk format

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