OSes

Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software

The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver.

Now that kernel 7.0 is out, the all-seeing Eye of Torvalds has shifted its gaze to the future kernel 7.1, which is likely to appear in a couple of months. One standout feature has already been merged: a new in-kernel read-write driver for Windows' default disk format, NTFS. Linus referred to it as the ntfs resurrection from Namjae Jeon. Some of the more excitable Linux blogs are getting breathless about this – but in our humble opinion, they're missing the real message.

This will not represent a massive shift in performance or anything like that. The existing in-kernel NTFS support is quite quick already. The real lesson to take from this is about clean, maintainable, thoroughly commented code, which means that one developer can take it over from another even decades later.

Why the switch

The Reg FOSS desk described the driver in October 2025, and we recapped its history back then. It's from Korean developer Namjae Jeon, formerly of Samsung but now working with Samba. He's on his way to being one of the Linux filesystem gurus: as we reported in 2022, back then he contributed the code to allow Linux to fix corrupted exFAT volumes, which we are sure by now has saved the data of many users of large flash storage media.

This is not a huge new Linux feature. As this archived copy of the Linux-NTFS Project web page shows, Linux got the ability to read NTFS volumes with kernel 2.1.74 in 1997. Just over a decade later, that was joined by the FUSE NTFS-3G driver, which is sponsored by Tuxera. Because it runs as a user-mode program, not inside the kernel, NTFS-3G isn't as fast and is a little more limited: you can't boot from it, for instance.

That changed in 2021, when Paragon Software donated a new read-write GPL NTFS driver to the kernel. After considerable effort and discussion, that made it into kernel 5.15 shortly before this vulture joined The Register team. Donating a large and complex driver to the Linux kernel isn't a one-off project, though: it needs to be constantly maintained, and within some six months, this started to become a problem.

Around that time, Namjae started work on modernizing the original 1990s read-only NTFS driver, adding write support as well as revising it to use modern kernel filesystem handling features such as large folios.

Now, it's in: the original NTFS driver has been replaced. When the next minor release of the kernel appears, it will be optional, and can be enabled with a Kconfig switch called NTFS_FS. For now, Paragon's NTFS3 driver will stay in-tree, but it looks likely that its days are now numbered.

The new driver should be slightly faster, and it already passes more compliance tests. The pull request says:

It took many months of work for Paragon to get its code accepted back when, as The Register documented at the time: after the original 27,000-line submission, Paragon refactored it into manageable chunks over four releases, which the following year led to its acceptance.

It could be that five years later, all that effort will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

This is the important thing to take away, and every vibe-coding "10x developer" should be paying attention. They aren't, of course, but the rest of us are. ®