Greetings,
Main topics:
- New stable release
- Security advisory
- Project moved to GitHub
- Performance notes
The new stable release of NTFS-3G and ntfsprogs is available which
includes important security fixes. The security advisory is available at
https://github.com/tuxera/ntfs-3g/security/advisories/GHSA-q759-8j5v-q5jp
The NTFS-3G project globally aims at providing a stable NTFS driver. The
project's advanced branch has specifically aimed at developing,
maturing, and releasing features for user feedback prior to feature
integration into the project's main branch.
The parallel existence of both a stable and advanced variant maintained
across several locations has caused some confusion. In particular, the
Linux distributions observed different policies in selecting which
version they use for their packaging. That led to users questioning the
differences between features, and to additional challenges in providing
support.
We've decided to merge the two projects and maintain a single repository
for source code and documentation on GitHub. As the projects have always
remained in close contact, this will cause no discontinuity in the
released features, while enabling smoother support. The former
repository on Sourceforge will be discontinued after a grace period, to
allow users time to adapt to the project's new state. Please use
GitHub's infrastructure for issue submission and release notification.
There have been some reports about very slow performance. Performance is
a complex topic and NTFS-3G always aimed for stability, interoperability
and portability over performance. Having said that, we did some
investigation and benchmarking. What we have found are
1. Some distributions use an older and slower version of NTFS-3G.
2. The "big_writes" mount option is not used. This option can increase
>4kB IO block size write speed by 2-8 times. File transfers typically
use 128kB which usually give a 3-4 times speed improvement. The option
is safe to use and we plan to enable it by default in the next stable
release.
3. Incorrect interpretation of benchmark results. For example in a
recent public case the total runtime was completely distorted by an
irrelevant test case hereby a wrong conclusion was made, namely NTFS-3G
was thought to be over 4 times slower instead of 21% faster. More about
this soon on linux-fsdevel.
In our file transfer benchmarks we have found NTFS-3G read and write
speed was 15-20% less compared to ext4. Read was 3.4 GB/s versus 2.8
GB/s, and write was 1.3 GB/s vs 1.1 GB/s. Nevertheless, different
benchmarks can give different results.
The new release can be downloaded from
https://github.com/tuxera/ntfs-3g/releases/tag/2021.8.22
Changelog is available at
https://github.com/tuxera/ntfs-3g/wiki/NTFS-3G-Release-History
Many thanks to Rakesh Pandit, Jussi Hietanen, Erik Larsson, Szabolcs
Szakacsits and many Tuxerians for their contributions to this release
and to the migration to GitHub.
We also want to add special thanks to Jeremy Galindo, Akshay Ajayan,
Kyle Zeng and Fish Wang, whose analyses were of great help in improving
the security of the code.
With best regards,
Jean-Pierre & Tuxera Open Source Team
