On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:34:01 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> ntfs-3g is what uses ntfs.sys - and that one is very stable and usable.
> 
> Is that how it works? That's rather ... baroque. I'm going to have to
> laugh next time someone tells me that having the source code is
> necessary to understand how something works. :-)

I believe that's how it works - much like how ndiswrapper can be used to 
use Windows WLAN drivers on Linux.

But using a closed-source driver doesn't mean you have any idea how it 
works, just how to interface with it - and that's what reverse 
engineering is for.

>> But there's *always* risk to using ntfs.sys even with Windows - things
>> can go wrong even in a native Windows environment.
> 
> What surprises me is that there's anything on the file system that can
> grow without bound. But as I understand it, at least the security
> descriptors (i.e., the ACLs) can get put in a hash table and never
> removed. Seems odd.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

Jim

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