New NTFS Driver Sees Hardening & Fixes, Windows Native Symlinks With Linux 7.2

Happening back in Linux 7.1 was the "NTFS resurrection" with landing a new NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that had been years in the making and began as the former NTFS read-only kernel driver many years back before the stint of the Paragon NTFS3 driver in the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 that new/modern NTFS driver has seen more hardening work, some fixes, and Windows native symbolic links support.

The main feature of this modern NTFS driver for Linux 7.2 is handling Windows native symbolic links. This is the file-system level symbolic links on Windows and not to be confused with the .lnk files. As noted that new, native symbolic link handling can be controlled with the NTFS driver via mount options depending upon your desired handling.

The NTFS driver is also now better hardened against malformed on-disk metadata. Plus a variety of bug fixes that have come up since the increase in user testing of this new file-system driver since Linux 7.1.

"- Harden handling of malformed on-disk metadata. It adds stricter validation for attributes, attribute lists, index roots and entries, EA entries, mapping pairs, and $LogFile restart areas. These changes fix several out-of-bounds access, integer overflow, and inconsistent metadata handling issues.

- Preventing a writeback deadlock involving extent MFT records

- Fixing resource leaks in fill_super() failure paths and the name cache

- Serializing volume label access and improving its error handling

- Fixing mapping-pairs decoding bounds and LCN overflow checks

- Keeping resident index root metadata consistent during resize

- Fixing the reported size of symbolic links

- Avoiding an unnecessary allocation for resident inline data

- Adds support for following and creating Windows native symbolic links. Relative links, absolute links, and junctions are handled, with new mount options controlling native symlink creation and absolute target translation. The existing WSL symlink behavior remains the default.

- The unsupported quota code is removed, along with several smaller cleanups."

The full list of now-merged NTFS patches can be found via this pull.