While New NTFS Driver Merged, NTFS3 Driver Sees Fixes & Minor Changes For Linux 7.1

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 20 April 2026 at 03:41 PM EDT. 5 Comments

Last week saw the "NTFS resurrection" as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver.

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software today sent out a batch of new additions and bug fixes to that NTFS3 driver. Nothing too exciting but a number of different fixes and lower-level improvements:

"Added:
reject inodes with zero non-DOS link count
return folios from ntfs_lock_new_page()
subset of W=1 warnings for stricter checks
work around -Wmaybe-uninitialized warnings
buffer boundary checks to run_unpack()
terminate the cached volume label after UTF-8 conversion

Fixed:
check return value of indx_find to avoid infinite loop
prevent uninitialized lcn caused by zero len
increase CLIENT_REC name field size to prevent buffer overflow
missing run load for vcn0 in attr_data_get_block_locked()
memory leak in indx_create_allocate()
OOB write in attr_wof_frame_info()
mount failure on volumes with fragmented MFT bitmap
integer overflow in run_unpack() volume boundary check
validate rec->used in journal-replay file record check

Changed:
resolve compare function in public index APIs
$LXDEV xattr lookup
potential double iput on d_make_root() failure
initialize err in ni_allocate_da_blocks_locked()
correct the pre_alloc condition in attr_allocate_clusters()"

The full list of patches can be found via this pull request. It will be interesting to do some head-to-head testing to see how the new NTFS driver stacks up in the real-world use against the existing NTFS3 driver that has largely stagnated since being mainlined.