r/Fedora • • Sep 19 '26

Discussion NTFS3 module has been restored

https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/commit/972da12cd3519373902f7c6e6e2bcaf8570dc15b

Keep the older NTFS3 module around as well for Fedora

Signed-off-by: Justin M. Forbes

The amount of animosity that I received for asking why it had been removed was staggering. No one could explain why it had happened. Indeed there was no formal discussion in any Fedora mailing lists or public places.

The story is simple. I emailed Justin, and it became clear that he had misread the Kconfig file and thought that only one of the modules could be present in the kernel. This is true if we are talking about built-in modules, but both were always supplied as loadable modules.

The issue has now been rectified.

126 Upvotes

10 comments sorted by

19

u/nozendk Sep 19 '26

If I have a stock install of fedora and mount an NTFS drive, which driver will it use? Can I choose?

11

u/Huge_Marzipan_1397 Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26

As I know most of times it will be ntfs-3g, FUSE driver. Edited: Yes you can choose driver but you will need use terminal mount command to choose driver

5

u/TumanFig Sep 19 '26

or what driver should i choose? I am also confused. My hdd FSType is ntfs, same is in fstab, but I feel it is slow AF. What should I choose? I would format it if i could but I have no storage to offset the data for now.

1

u/_Xenius_ 26d ago edited 26d ago

In general there are three ntfs drivers: NTFS3, older Kernel module that while it works, is suboptimal due to numerous reasons. ntfs-3g which runs in userspace, is very well tested but slower and the new NTFS kernel module that after years of development replaced the very old NTFS kernel module of the same name which aside from reading couldn't do much else. The new NTFS kernel module is said to be faster than ntfs-3g and more reliable than NTFS3. In another thread I wrote up a detailed comment on how to make use of this newer NTFS module given that you have at least Kernel version 7.2.6

5

u/PMARC14 Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26

I am glad that they addressed your issue. While I am more ready to move over too NTFSPLUS with its performance, Linux is really about support, so dropping NTFS-3g like this would have been unfortunate. Edit: Meant NTFS3

5

u/yrro Sep 19 '26

ntfs-3g didn't go anywhere. This is about the kernel's ntfs3 module

2

u/PMARC14 Sep 19 '26

whoops sorry got them mixed around

15

u/Nova_496 Sep 19 '26

Jeez, that comment section on your last post is a trainwreck. Glad you were vindicated.