Making today very exciting in Linux 7.1 merge window land was a pull request being sent out for introducing the new, modern NTFS file-system driver. Linus Torvalds has yet to comment if he’s going to merge the new driver but it looks like it’s ready for providing a better Linux NTFS experience over the current NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed by Paragon Software a few years ago and hasn’t seen too much feature progress.

Veteran Linux developer Namjae Jeon who has been responsible for exFAT driver work, KSMBD, and other kernel contributions announced NTFSPLUS last year as a better NTFS driver with greater performance and more features over what the NTFS3 driver or other NTFS driver alternatives provides. That driver has been iterated on in recent months and ultimately dropped the “NTFS PLUS” name as just taking on a remake of the original Linux NTFS kernel driver.