[20833] in Athena Bugs
Re: NTFS support for Linux-Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arun A Tharuvai)
Fri Sep 27 16:59:13 2002
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 16:55:59 -0400
From: Arun A Tharuvai <aatharuv@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
Cc: aatharuv@mit.edu, bugs@mit.edu, davidmac@mit.edu
Message-ID: <20020927205559.GD15305@multics.mit.edu>
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On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 01:27:26AM -0400, Greg Hudson wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 23:59, David A McIlroy wrote:
> > I've found that ntfs support is not included in the stock kernel. Which
> > makes trying to get at my data on my old hard drive difficult. Is there
> > any intention to add support (even as a loadable module) for ntfs? I
> > would strongly encourage adding support.
>
> As much as it would be nice, I'm thinking no. It's a bad sign that Red
> Hat doesn't provide this support natively, and it's already enough of a
> nightmare providing kernel modules for OpenAFS. (Unlike Solaris and
> other operating systems, Linux does not provide a consistent ABI for
> modules across kernel versions, kernel configuration, or architecture,
> so a site like us has to build modules five different ways and keep them
> in sync with the kernel updates.)
>
> Of course, nothing stops you from building a kernel module yourself for
> your machine. (You'd have to rebuild it every time you take an Athena
> update which updates the kernel, of course.)
These days, most PCs come preinstalled with WindowsXP, which defaults
to using an NTFS filesystem by default. Making everyone who wants to
dual boot WindowsXP and Linux Athena build a kernel module seems
suboptimal, and a deterrent for people trying to install Linux Athena
as a second operating system on their own computers. People shouldn't
have to compile kernel modules for required functionality (if
dual-booting is now considered supported, that is).
Arun
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