File Systems/NTFS
From ReactOS
The on-disk structure for Ntfs is partially known thanks to the linux-ntfs project:
- http://www.linux-ntfs.org
- http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ldm/index.html Logical Disk Manager
- A brief history of NTFS
- http://www.ntfs-3g.org
For more general information on NTFS, see the Wikipedia Article on it.
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Reasons for and against implementing native NTFS support
For
- Ability to use partitions used by Microsoft(R) Windows(R). This assumes that once a free, journalled FS has been developed for ReactOS that it will not be possible to use it on Microsoft(R) Windows(R) instead of NTFS..
Against
- The specification for NTFS is not open, and so could never be guaranteed to be compatible with Microsoft's implementations.
- If an open FS (such as ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) were given native/bootable support, applications would still talk to the FS. driver and should therefore still work. The underlying FS would be transparent, as long as the same security/permission mechanisms were present. Correct?
Current plans for supporting NTFS and open/free filesystems
Note: To the best of my knowledge, these are not official project-wide plans, but rather those of Alex Ionescu who is probably most suited for implementing NTFS. If they are project-wide plans, then delete this notice.
Alex Ionescu, who is very familiar with NTFS and does alot of important work for ROS. He says that "implementing a free NTFS driver is not a priority right now. Getting the XP one to run is." This is of course in addition to the priority of implementing a good free FS like ext3 or ReiserFS. ("We have EXT 2 driver skeleton allready" -Weird_w). Many people have suggested that we use code from captive NTFS, but we don't need to do because ReactOS is already designed to load FS drivers like Windows does, we just need to do work to get it to load successfully. We can legally do this because MS allows you to load NTFS.sys in other operating systems provided you own a legal copy of Windows. People would only want to load up MS NTFS.sys, once free FS's are implemented in ROS, if they already have a copy of Windows (and presumably a license for it) on their machine anyways and wish to access the Windows partition(s) from ReactOS. That said, he still explains that "we might write a FOSS NTFS driver for reactos but we don't have to make it 100% compatible with NT NTFS because that'll be for people that don't have NT." And I think it is safe to presume that they will borrow as much work as possible from linux-NTFS when they do that.
He also believes that NTFS should be the default FS, and using EXT 2/3 (or presumably other open filesystems) should be a fallback.
