One of the nice Linux kernel accomplishments during the pandemic was getting the NTFS3 driver upstreamed for that modern NTFS file-system read/write driver developed by Paragon Software. In recent times that NTFS3 driver has been seeing occasional fixes and for the Linux 6.17 kernel -- and perhaps then back-ported to existing kernels -- are some notable fixes for those relying on drives formatted with this Microsoft file-system.

The NTFS3 driver will now handle symlinks created on NTFS partitions under Windows. It turns out symbolic links created on Windows weren't handled correctly with the Linux NTFS3 driver until now, but thanks to adjusting a few dozen lines of code is now addressed.

As another fix, NTFS3 also now correctly handles creation of symlinks with relative paths. Symlinks using relative paths is another surprising bit that apparently didn't work properly with the NTFS3 driver until now.

The NTFS3 pull request for Linux 6.17 also adds sanity checks for file names and some other minor alterations.