In August of 2020, Paragon Software, the German software company that develops hard drive management software, proposed its own implementation of Microsoft NTFS called NTFS3, as a Linux kernel driver. The main drawback of this implementation is speed.

The NTFS-3G is another open source implementation of Microsoft NTFS that includes read and write support, but it’s a filesystem in userspace (FUSE). The existing Linux NTFS driver, which implementation dated back by 2001, is basically unmaintained in the kernel and lacks proper write support along with other features. With NTFS support, Linux users can use attaching external NTFS drives or boot Windows PCs into Linux for troubleshooting. It is the default file system used by Microsoft operating systems since Windows XP. The New Technology File System (NTFS) is Microsoft’s proprietary file system first introduced with Windows NT 3.1 in 1993.

Paragon Software is looking to mainline their read-write NTFS3 driver into the mainline kernel tree as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS kernel driver.

Signed paragon driver for windows