Why Is the NTFS3 Linux Driver Unmaintained and What Does Linus Torvalds Advise?

Concerns have been raised about the "new" NTFS Linux driver (NTFS3) because it has received virtually no maintenance since being merged into the mainline less than a year ago.

Linus Torvalds commented on the issue, encouraging other developers to take over its maintenance.

Since the driver was mainlined in Linux 5.15 last year, no significant bug fixes have been submitted. The driver originated as a proprietary driver from Paragon Software; some fixes appeared in Paragon's Git tree but were never upstreamed. Other developers have tried to contact the original maintainer without success.

The driver provides read/write support and features missing from existing NTFS drivers, outperforming FUSE‑based alternatives, which sparked a public discussion last week.

Speculation that the lack of maintenance is linked to the Russia‑Ukraine conflict is unfounded, as the upstream inactivity dates back to the fourth quarter of the previous year, before the war began.

Kari Argillander opened a thread on the kernel mailing list, offering patches and proposing to become a co‑maintainer after attempts to reach Paragon developers.

Linus Torvalds responded positively, inviting Kari and any interested kernel developers to take over the driver’s upkeep, essentially saying that if the original maintainer Konstantin Komarov steps back, pull requests from the community will be welcomed.

If you are willing to maintain it (perhaps finding others to help), I think it’s definitely worth a try. If we can’t find anyone to care for and maintain it, then perhaps we should delete it rather than have two ineffective, unmaintained NTFS driver copies. It’s not that two unmaintained filesystems are dramatically worse :-P

Developer Namjae Jeon, who is working on adding write support to the read‑only NTFS driver, responded that he aims to release his work in a few months and then start work on ntfs‑3g’s ntfsprogs to improve practicality.

The future development of NTFS support on Linux will be observed throughout the year.