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Hopefully this is programming related.

Many people have reported that the NTFS-3G driver works perfectly for writing to NTFS drives without any problems.

If NTFS has been successfully reverse engineered to a useful degree, then why is the kernel driver still only read-only, with write support being very dangerous.....just as it was 5 years agi?

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    License issues would be my guess
    – Robus
    May 9, 2010 at 15:12
  • I don't agree with your premise. The NTFS-3G driver is the default or is easy to install on most modern distros. See e.g. ntfs-3g.com/distributions.html May 9, 2010 at 15:31
  • @ire_and_curses - you don't agree with my premise? What? It doesn't matter that NTFS-3G is the default on most modern distros, it has nothing to do with my quetsion.....
    – Jack
    May 9, 2010 at 15:55
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    @jack: you should register your accounts on Stack Overflow and Super User, then associate them together in your user profile (on the accounts tab). this will allow you to regain ownership of this question, edit, and accept an answer. registering will also prevent account access problems (eg, if you lose your cookie). May 9, 2010 at 16:12
  • @quack: I mistyped my email address with the temp account, so it seems that I can't actually do this. I can already accept answers and edit though...
    – Jack
    May 10, 2010 at 1:22

2 Answers 2

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This question is answered in Linux-NTFS.org's info page:

"The old kernel_driver trashed NTFS volumes. It created a bad name for Linux support of NTFS."

"So the current driver only supplies a feature once it CAN NOT TRASH [the users'] system."

"So basically, there is a lot to be done, and only one [active] man to do it."

It's a time issue, in the end. As you pondered, yes, all knowledge needed for NTFS write support has already been gathered and reverse engineering is not required anymore. It's pure implementation that's left to do but it takes a lot of time, based on the quoted facts.

I don't know what your reasons are not to use ntfsmount, but if you absolutely need the kernel driver, you can do it yourself (open source ftw!) or support the original author(s) to do it faster.

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What linux distribution are you talking about? Several modern Linux distros have NTFS-3G integrated as the default NTFS kernel driver.

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  • I'm not talking about any distro, but the kernel. NTFS-3G is a userspace driver. The kernel driver still does not have write support. Why not?
    – Jack
    May 9, 2010 at 15:56

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