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⇱ Linux's Modern NTFS Driver Will Now Correctly Handle Symlinks Created On Windows - Phoronix


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Linux's Modern NTFS Driver Will Now Correctly Handle Symlinks Created On Windows

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 26 July 2025 at 06:44 AM EDT. 49 Comments
One of the nice Linux kernel accomplishments during the pandemic was getting the NTFS3 driver upstreamed for that modern NTFS file-system read/write driver developed by Paragon Software. In recent times that NTFS3 driver has been seeing occasional fixes and for the Linux 6.17 kernel -- and perhaps then back-ported to existing kernels -- are some notable fixes for those relying on drives formatted with this Microsoft file-system.

The NTFS3 driver will now handle symlinks created on NTFS partitions under Windows. It turns out symbolic links created on Windows weren't handled correctly with the Linux NTFS3 driver until now, but thanks to adjusting a few dozen lines of code is now addressed.

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As another fix, NTFS3 also now correctly handles creation of symlinks with relative paths. Symlinks using relative paths is another surprising bit that apparently didn't work properly with the NTFS3 driver until now.

The NTFS3 pull request for Linux 6.17 also adds sanity checks for file names and some other minor alterations.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.