Paragon NTFS for Linux 7.0 Public Beta Testing

[Anatoly_Paragon]

Dear Forum Visitors,

For the past year Paragon (www.paragon-software.com) has been working on a new version of Paragon NTFS for Linux 7.0. NTFS for Linux 7.0 is a driver allowing Linux users to access (read and write) Microsoft NTFS file systems. With the new version, the driver has been significantly improved, and several bugs were fixed.

The product is almost ready for market release and we want to offer you the Public Beta version. This is the first time that we've offered beta testing for this driver. We do it because we want to make Paragon NTFS for Linux a useful tool for every Linux user -- that is why we need your opinion about it.

According to existing feedback, the main issue most users encounter when using our driver is with installation. So, if you choose to test the Beta version with us, please pay attention to the installation stage because it is important for us to make a driver that will support the most Linux distributions as possible.

What we expect from you:
1. Bug reports (though we hope that there won't be many). If you find a bug, describe with details how it can be reproduced by our developers. We need every detail, every step (even if it seems minor). Please specify your Linux distribution and Linux kernel version.

2. Usability issues. We want to make the product as easy to use as possible. Write us with your suggestions on what you think we can improve upon or what should be changed. Make your suggestions both detailed and reasonable so we can understand what your concerns are as well as determine if possible to implement.

To download the public beta version, please fill out a short web form (http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-linux/betatesting.html).

In addition, you can review the “How to install” readme file here (http://www.paragon-software.com/export/sites/paragonsoftware.com/home/ntfs-linux/ReadMe.txt).

Our commitment to you: We will read your feedback in this thread very carefully. Please excuse (in advance) any perceived lack of replies to your posts. We won’t be able to reply to all of them, but we will do "summary" replies once or twice a week in this thread.

PS. We value this forum's community members very much. That's why we selected you for our Public beta testing. In exchange for your help, we will be glad to provide the most active beta testers with NTFS for Linux Professional Edition free of charge.

Thank you in advance and best regards,
Paragon NTFS for Linux team.

[Steveway]

30$ for something that we allready have with a truly free and open-source program? This sounds like Spam. Why should we buy your product and not use ntfs-3g, or even better not use NTFS at all?

[Anatoly_Paragon]

Dear Steveway,

Please note:
1. We are going to provide NTFS for Linux 7.0 Personal Edition for free (for non-commercial use only);
2. Our driver is much faster than NTFS-3g (write performance especially). You can check it.

Best regards,
Anatoly.

[Steveway]

Free in what sense? Free as in beer or free as in freedom?
You know, Software-freedom is a very important thing for most of us, what garuantee do we have that your software does not do anything harmful and will be supported and developed on in the future? We only have your word, and while I don't want to decrease the value of your word, that is not enough.
It's nice that we can have it for "free" and I'm positively suprised by your friendly answer but for people that decided on a free and open-source Operating-system it doen't really make sense to use a closed-source alternative of something that we allready got as a free and open-source variant.
PS: Also, are there any side-by-side comparisions to show the speed improvements of your driver against ntfs-3g backed up by numbers?

[pcjunkie]

Paragon. Why not improve on NTFS -3g? or make a windows ext* read / write?

Alot of people have to duel boot to windows because of games and office compatibility issues (TA M$). Going the other way was more imperative..

I like what you are doing, its just not needed. You can write open source and still sell M$ hacks..

[jrusso2]

Why hassle the guy he is already offering the program free for non-commercial use. This is why commercial companies won't develop for Linux all they get is grief from the users.

[Anatoly_Paragon]

Dear Steveway,

Thanks for your questions.

Paragon NTFS for Linux 7.0 should be release as a closed-source (library) but free software. We have tested NTFS for Linux for different configurations (kernel versions 2.4.x or 2.6.x), and we can guarantee the absence of any file or volume corruption. We arrange this public beta testing to release bug-free, full-fledged, most-Linux compatible NTFS driver for the Linux community.


it doen't really make sense to use a closed-source alternative of something that we allready got as a free and open-source variant.
We would like to release our driver with two main advantages:
1. Easy to install and use driver;
2. High performance and stable driver.


Also, are there any side-by-side comparisions to show the speed improvements of your driver against ntfs-3g backed up by numbers?
According to Iozone utility (IO Zone Benchmark Program), our write performance is several times higher that NTFS 3G has (2 – 9 times, it depends on file sizes).

Dear Pcjunkie,


Why not improve on NTFS -3g? or make a windows ext* read / write?
NTFS-3g is a user space driver not a kernel space (as ours). Kernel space drivers have higher performance than user space ones. Please note, Paragon has already EXT2/3 FS drivers for Windows and is going to release for Mac OS X in 2 months.

Looking forward to hearing your feedback.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Anatoly.

[bingoUV]

Free in what sense? Free as in beer or free as in freedom?
You know, Software-freedom is a very important thing for most of us, what garuantee do we have that your software does not do anything harmful and will be supported and developed on in the future?

Steveway,
Freedom doesn't matter for those who choose to trust their data to an undocumented blob of a filesystem commonly known as NTFS. Nothing against its performance/stability etc. but it is not exactly the choice of freedom lovers.

Having accepted slavery at the hands of NTFS, additional slavery from Paragon will not hurt much if the promised performance benefits materialize.

The lack of free choices argument won't help as there are many varied advanced free and Free filesystems for linux/*nix.

[szaka]

Hi,

Evaluation report and comments from the NTFS-3G Team.

Registration was not possible because of an 'Registration failed' error. The parameters were mine: szaka@ntfs-3g.org, Szabolcs, Szakacsits, Hungary, English and accepted the terms. Using different parameters the registration succeeded. The problem is 100% reproducible and anybody is free to test with my provided data above (if it works then I'll get an email). [UPDATE: Paragon fixed this problem: I started to get the test registration and it works for me too -- Szaka]

Installation went ok.

When an NTFS volume was mounted with the Paragon driver then the kernel logged this message:


kernel: ufsd: module license 'Commertial product' taints kernel.

What this means is explained at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s1-18 (Btw, Paragon should spell Commertial as Commercial.)

In other words, not only the potential backdoors, spywares, viruses are the real threat when the driver is installed but the softwares bugs which instabilize Ubuntu (system crashes, data corruption, not only on NTFS but Linux file systems as well). Moreover the above also means that whatever problem one will have with the system, open source developers can not and will not help the person because the system became "tainted" (unaudited, unchanged, unverified, untested, unreliable) and no reliability can be ensured in such circumstance by open source developers (we have no access to the code which causes the problems, so we can't help).

We tried to run some of our test suites listed at http://ntfs-3g.org/quality.html#testmethods but we have found that the Paragon 7.0 BETA driver is not in a state yet where it could be evaluated.

For instance compilation of software packages fails with gcc error. Running compilebench randomly halts with "No such file error" (seems to be a race condition or NTFS corruption).

Using an image file, system log gets flooded with the below messages:


kernel: Buffer I/O error on device loop0, logical block 31298816
kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on loop0
kernel: Buffer I/O error on device loop0, logical block 31298832
kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on loop0
kernel: Buffer I/O error on device loop0, logical block 31298848
kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on loop0
kernel: Buffer I/O error on device loop0, logical block 31298864
kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on loop0
kernel: Buffer I/O error on device loop0, logical block 31298880
kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on loop0
kernel: Buffer I/O error on device loop0, logical block 31298896


Afterwards not even NTFS-3G could work. The most serious is that, the 2.6.26 kernel got so seriously corrupted that the system had to be rebooted.

This basically could never happen with NTFS-3G because the non-performance critical functionality is executed in a protected memory space and the performance critical parts are shared with other file systems.

NTFS-3G is open source and free for commercial and non-commercial use both in the sense as beer and freedom.

We are committed to give away our work, this is what our GPL license means. We can give it away for free because it enjoys the full support of over 200 distributions, like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Debian, and quite many committed, paid and volunteer open source developers ;-)



According to Iozone utility (IO Zone Benchmark Program), our write performance is several times higher that NTFS 3G has (2 – 9 times, it depends on file sizes).

Let's compare the speeds when the Paragon driver can run the benchmarks, ok? It's easy to be fast when the driver trashes the system. You are comparing a currently unusable beta driver with a stable one ;-)

Performance is also a much more complex subject.

Moreover the priority of NTFS-3G was and always will be reliability over performance.



NTFS-3g is a user space driver not a kernel space (as ours).[/b]

No. NTFS-3G is a hybrid space driver. The performance critical work is done purely in the kernel. Only those say the above who don't (want to) understand how FUSE works.


Kernel space drivers have higher performance than user space ones.

This is absolutely untrue. Performance is a factor of quite many things. Mostly it depends on the file system and implementation design and the quality of the implementation.

Otherwise how would you explain that the current NTFS-3G driver in development performs much better than all stable kernel drivers (ext3, xfs, reiserfs)? http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/23/51

Of course Paragon style binary-only kernel drivers have several other disadvantages besides the above ones (losing the support of open source developers, questionable security and reliability, etc), for instance any time Ubuntu updates/upgrades the kernel, the Paragon driver can get broken. It may not function or may start to corrupt data, or even the Linux partitions (kernel corruptions).

Please also note when these happen you will not get help from open source developers since you're "tainted". On the other hand, Ubuntu and NTFS-3G closely cooperate for almost two years to provide reliable read/write NTFS support to Ubuntu users.

Best regards, Szaka

[szaka]

Freedom doesn't matter for those who choose to trust their data to an undocumented blob of a filesystem commonly known as NTFS.
The open source Linux community has reverse engineered and documented the NTFS format in the last 13 years. Quite probably this is the reason Paragon could also develop a commercial, closed-source NTFS driver ;-)

If you would like to ask anything about NTFS please feel free to do so, we'll be glad to reply you.

Regards, Szaka

[bingoUV]

The open source Linux community has reverse engineered and documented the NTFS format in the last 13 years. Quite probably this is the reason Paragon could also develop a commercial, closed-source NTFS driver ;-)

If you would like to ask anything about NTFS please feel free to do so, we'll be glad to reply you.

Regards, Szaka

I was wondering in amusement; whether Paragon or Microsoft will ever have their lead developers answer end user questions for free. Instead of a politically correct, lawyer filtered answer to legitimate user concerns; but I digress.

1. Do we support alternate data streams?

2. In-built compression/encryption? Though I am not sure it is in-built in NTFS or there is a utility in windows that works close to NTFS to achieve these ends.

These are the features I was most interested in when someone described NTFS to me.

Your lkml link was so interesting that I might do a performance test myself, involving the mount options I typically use.

EDIT: Sorry, I digressed too much. More interesting in this context is the question that:
Isn't it trivial for microsoft to release a patch to Vista and break ntfs-3g seriously without breaking backward compatibility with XP, and releases of Vista before this patch?

[Steveway]

Hi,

<snip>

Best regards, Szaka

That was pretty exactly what I wanted to hear. If I would need to use a ntfs-driver to access NTFS-partitions then I would certainly choose ntfs-3g (I'm Linux-only so I don't need one, but my point stays.).
Appereantly it seems to be the more reasonable choice.
BTW: Even though you said that your driver would be free for personal use, your website still says otherwise and wants 30$ for the personal version.

[szaka]

1. Do we support alternate data streams?

Yes, NTFS-3G supports streams if the "streams_interface=windows" mount option is used. This will be enabled by default in the future.



2. In-built compression/encryption? Though I am not sure it is in-built in NTFS or there is a utility in windows that works close to NTFS to achieve these ends.

NTFS can do transparent/built-in compression/encryption. We know how it works and have code for it. At the moment the stable release includes read-only support for transparent compression, and the other features will be included as well. It wasn't often requested, so it wasn't a high priority for us.



Your lkml link was so interesting that I might do a performance test myself, involving the mount options I typically use.

Your 32/64-bit performance tests were also very instructive! :-)



EDIT: Sorry, I digressed too much. More interesting in this context is the question that:
Isn't it trivial for microsoft to release a patch to Vista and break ntfs-3g seriously without breaking backward compatibility with XP, and releases of Vista before this patch?
It's not trivial. The on-disk file system format is bound to an NTFS version number stored on the disk. All incompatible changes modifies the NTFS version number what the NTFS-3G driver would detect and refuse to mount the volume until the open source development community checks the scenario and explicitly adds compatibility support.

[Joeb454]

Moved to Community Cafe

[Polygon]

im curious on why you even bothered to take the time to code and market a linux ntfs driver when...ntfs-3g has been around for quite a long time. and not to mention from the above posts, ntfs-3g is currently better.....

seriously, your talents and time could be better spent improving ntfs-3g. but that is just my opinion

[Scruffynerf]

Please note, Paragon has already EXT2/3 FS drivers for Windows


Linky please? Your claims are not being backed up by your website.

[gn2]

Beta Test Agreement
between
Paragon Software
15615 Alton Parkway, Suite 450
Irvine, CA 92618
and
You, as user
§ 1 Scope of this Agreement

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PARAGON reserves all rights not expressly granted.

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Offeror Identification:
Paragon Software
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Telephone: 1-888-347-5462 (1-888-DISK-IMAGE);
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^No thanks, I'll stick with open source.

But Anatoly_Paragon, if you want me to beta-test your commercial product, PM me so that we can negotiate the fee which I will charge you for my time and effort.

[kpkeerthi]

I will not use this product, I neither have a need for it. But I'm glad that linux gets one more commercial product offering, which is what we all should appreciate.

[awakatanka]

I would say thanks for people that are willing to make commercial applications and drivers for linux. But don't need it because NTFS-3G does everything i need. But i can see a need for this in companies that need more and support. so good work.

[Canis familiaris]

But Anatoly_Paragon, if you want me to beta-test your commercial product, PM me so that we can negotiate the fee which I will charge you for my time and effort.
lol

[mips]

Everything has a place. The responses here seem out of line and like typical linux zealotry to me.

If the product is in fact better then I can see a market for it, especially in a commercial environment.

Linux users always complain about a lack of commercial apps but when it comes around it is attacked.

Shame on you. We live in a free society, we can all decide what it is we want and don't want. (And what we are willing to pay for.)

[NTolerance]

Why hassle the guy he is already offering the program free for non-commercial use. This is why commercial companies won't develop for Linux all they get is grief from the users.

Seriously. The Linux community really needs to back off on the hostility and welcome any and all new software development. Don't like the license? Don't buy it but also don't discourage its development.

[Polygon]

Everything has a place. The responses here seem out of line and like typical linux zealotry to me.

If the product is in fact better then I can see a market for it, especially in a commercial environment.

Linux users always complain about a lack of commercial apps but when it comes around it is attacked.

Shame on you. We live in a free society, we can all decide what it is we want and don't want. (And what we are willing to pay for.)

it costs 30 dollars, it doesn't even work, and there is a fully functional (im not aware of any limitations) open source driver, ntfs-3g. Id be happy to pay for commercial programs if there is a niche for them. Like gimp doesnt compare to adobe photoshop, and nexiuz doesnt compare to team fortress 2 (a video game). But expecting people or companies to pay for a program when a free one exists just seems silly to me.

[Anatoly_Paragon]

Dear Szaka,

Thank you for your feedback.

Please find my answers below.

1. The registration procedure was updated. Thanks.

2. The "kernel: ufsd: module license 'Commertial product' taints kernel." message means that you have used a source-closed software. This message will be displayed when using ANY source-closed driver.

3.
(we have no access to the code which causes the problems, so we can't help).
Paragon constantly develops and supports its NTFS drivers. We will be glad to fix any incompatibility or performance issue immediately.

4. Thank you for paying our attention to the "Compilebench" utility. We will fix any issue when testing our driver with this utility before our official release.

5. We believe NTFS-3G is a great piece of software and we understand its priorities and targets. Paragon just would like to direct all its experience in files system drivers and provide the Linux community with alternative kernel space solution. We believe that we can combine high performance with high stability and release easy-to-install and use NTFS driver for free.


Dear bingoUV,

Paragon supports alternate data streams and compression (full read and write). What do you mean by encryption support? Paragon may copy an encrypted file (from source) to EXT2/3 FS, NTFS, FAT and then copy it back (to source) keeping encryption capabilities intact (use cpntfs utility for this purpose).

Dear Steveway,

We are going to release NTFS for Linux 7.0, after public beta testing, for free. But before releasing we would like to make sure our driver supports the most commonly used Linux distributions without any issues.

Dear Polygon,

Paragon has been developing our Universal File System Technology (UFSD) technology for the last 6 years. UFSD includes NTFS driver for Linux, Mac OSX, DOS, ... as well as EXT2/3 driver for Windows, Mac OS X,.. Most Paragon products use the UFSD technology that is why we have to constantly improve this technology.

Dear Scruffynerf,

The EXT2/3 FS drivers for Windows are implemented in our backup/restore solutions. If this driver can be interested in the Linux Community we can separate this driver as a single driver/application.

Dear mips and NTolerance,

Thank you!


Polygon,


it costs 30 dollars
We will make it free of charge (Personal Edition).


it doesn't even work
Really? If you find a bug, just let us know and we will fix it immediately.


But expecting people or companies to pay for a program when a free one exists just seems silly to me
Paragon has a great experience in this field. We provide companies with customization and maintenance services. They are not silly.

Looking forward to hearing your test results.
Best regards,
Anatoly.

[bingoUV]

Thank you Anatoly.



2. The "kernel: ufsd: module license 'Commertial product' taints kernel." message means that you have used a source-closed software. This message will be displayed when using ANY source-closed driver.


Not if you fix the spelling. It is 'Commercial', not 'Commertial'. Though your name as well as your language in other posts suggests that you are not a native English speaker, nor is this company based in English speaking locality. Correct me if I am wrong. Though it makes no difference to the quality of your software.

NTFS has an in-built encryption support. It is not that you encrypt a file using some other tool, get an encrypted file and store this encrypted file in the file system. With NTFS, you create a file, and ask NTFS to store it in an encrypted form. During mount, maybe it will ask you for the decryption key, I am not sure. But when the user reads the file after mount, it would be presented as non-encrypted file. This is a feature in NTFS, which protects against loss of data through stolen hard disk. I was asking Szaka whether NTFS-3g supports this. Please let us know whether Paragon's driver supports this feature i.e. in windows if I store a file encrypted using this NTFS feature, and if I want to mount this in linux using Paragon's driver; will I be able to read the decrypted file after supplying the key somehow.

Similarly for compression, though a key would not be required.

[xchaotic]

1. Do we support alternate data streams?

2. In-built compression/encryption? Though I am not sure it is in-built in NTFS or there is a utility in windows that works close to NTFS to achieve these ends.

3. Isn't it trivial for microsoft to release a patch to Vista and break ntfs-3g seriously without breaking backward compatibility with XP, and releases of Vista before this patch?

1. The only popular use of ADS is for rootkits, trojan horses and all sorts of malware. Not exactly very important to keep that.

2. In my view compression doesn't belong at fs level, some files do not compress at all or are compressed already (xvid, mp3), storage is cheap, so why bother? and if you bother, it's best done higher in the layer cake.

3. Microsoft have to support a huge variety of systems on OSes from Win2000 to Vista, they have enough bugfixing already, without introducing problems on purpose.

[toupeiro]

Sounds interesting. I've never really had any problems, performance or otherwise, with ntfs-3g, but I'm always game to test something new.

If you really want to SELL something, NTFS is probably not your sweetspot. SMBv2, however......

[bingoUV]

1. The only popular use of ADS is for rootkits, trojan horses and all sorts of malware. Not exactly very important to keep that.

2. In my view compression doesn't belong at fs level, some files do not compress at all or are compressed already (xvid, mp3), storage is cheap, so why bother? and if you bother, it's best done higher in the layer cake.


Agree totally with point 2. Don't have much experience with windows to comment about point 1, though I heard some popular software depends on alternate data streams.

But let us not kid ourselves. If somebody is using NTFS-3g, it is not for the whizz-bang features of NTFS, incredible stability or any such nonsense. It is plainly because of compatibility with Microsoft's implementation of NTFS. So that you write to the filesystem using windows, mount the same in *nix and read the data correctly. Also, write in *nix, and read in windows.

Which is why, supporting all these features is important. Otherwise, a windows application might compress the data using NTFS's compression mechanism and we are stuck with data unreadable in *nix world. Or it pushes stuff in an ADS and we are unable to find it anyhow in *nix world.

Compatibility with Microsoft's implementation of NTFS is the whole,sole,singular reason for existence of NTFS-3g. Otherwise, there are numerous equally good/better ways of doing filesystems that are not born and brought up in Redmond.

EDIT: Actually, if ADS is used by malware, it is great. Malware will most likely be platform specific, unportable code which will unable to do harm in *nix. NTFS-3g will become a great tool in analysis of malware if it supports ADS (which it does).

[zolookas]

Please note:
1. We are going to provide NTFS for Linux 7.0 Personal Edition for free (for non-commercial use only);
2. Our driver is much faster than NTFS-3g (write performance especially). You can check it.1. ntfs-3g is free in both means, i can use it where i want.
2. ntfs-3g performance is sufficient, i have not experienced any problems with it.


We would like to release our driver with two main advantages:
1. Easy to install and use driver;
2. High performance and stable driver.1. ntfs-3g is preinstalled on many distributions including ubuntu
2. According to szaka (http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=52867) it is not so stable after all. I have been using paragon ntfs v5 when ntfs-3g was not released and it worked pretty well, except one time one movie disappeared from folder in front of my eyes (i was watching another movie from the same folder at the moment), but after using scandisk, that file was recovered.

Maybe a bit offtopic: Also you can get a free ext2 (works with ext3 since it is backwards compatible) driver for windows at http://www.fs-driver.org/ No need to buy any paragon product.

By the way, Paragon, I've just wanted to say that your Partition Manager is the tool that works great when others refuse to.


Everything has a place. The responses here seem out of line and like typical linux zealotry to me.

If the product is in fact better then I can see a market for it, especially in a commercial environment.

Linux users always complain about a lack of commercial apps but when it comes around it is attacked.

Shame on you. We live in a free society, we can all decide what it is we want and don't want. (And what we are willing to pay for.)

Maybe it is better if you want commercial support, but we have even better and free alternative available so it does not make very much sense if any.

[Jotnar]

Lets lay off the Paragon bashing alright?

Paragon was selling reliable NTFS write capabilities for Linux before NTFS-3G even existed. Your choices at the time were the buggy as hell kernel driver or Paragon's software. Its dissapointing to see so many people get bent out of shape when a company that has been selling software for Linux longer than most want people to help make their software better. Seriously, why would any company want to bother with the "Community" when this is the response they get?

I'll give their software a try though I'll probably stick with NTFS-3G. Isn't it worth an hour or two of your time to test software from a company that has been selling usefull software for Linux for years?

Cheers

[Polygon]

i WOULD (and a lot of people would be too) be interested in a actually FUNCTIONAL ext3 driver for windows, rather then the crappy old ext2 one that is out there. so yes, please split off that ext3 driver thing from your backup program