Making today very exciting in Linux 7.1 merge window land was a pull request being sent out for introducing the new, modern NTFS file-system driver. Linus Torvalds has yet to comment if he's going to merge the new driver but it looks like it's ready for providing a better Linux NTFS experience over the current NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed by Paragon Software a few years ago and hasn't seen too much feature progress.

Veteran Linux developer Namjae Jeon who has been responsible for exFAT driver work, KSMBD, and other kernel contributions announced NTFSPLUS last year as a better NTFS driver with greater performance and more features over what the NTFS3 driver or other NTFS driver alternatives provides. That driver has been iterated on in recent months and ultimately dropped the "NTFS PLUS" name as just taking on a remake of the original Linux NTFS kernel driver.

This four-year-long effort by Namjae Jeon has resulted in full write support, better stability compared to NTFS3 with passing more XFStests, new user-space utilities for FSCK and more, and making use of modern Linux kernel features like IOmap and folio integration. The newer kernel tech integration is better off than the current NTFS3 driver.

Over the past two months this new NTFS driver has been in Linux-Next getting exposure and also getting reviewed by key Linux stakeholders.

This new/overhauled NTFS driver amounts to over 36k lines of new code for the Linux kernel.

Again we are still waiting to see if Linus Torvalds is comfortable enough with this new driver to merge it for Linux 7.1 with its merge window ending at the end of next week. Those wanting to learn more about this new NTFS driver for Linux can do so via this pull request . For now this pull request still leaves NTFS3 within the kernel source tree should anyone still have a preference to that existing driver.