On 4/4/07, Greg Bailey gbailey@lxpro.com wrote:
David G. Miller wrote:
John Summerfield debian@herakles.homelinux.org wrote:
Could it be that Red Hat doesn't enable NTFS in their kernels because they simply don't want to support NTFS?
-Greg
In a way.. the read/write support for NTFS has always been best as you can get by not having any specs. Back in 1999 there was some talk about having it in the 6.x releases, as many people said it was fully ready etc etc. The testing ended up being something like this:
Install NT-4.0 on system, install RHL-6.x with NTFS installed. See if you can mount system, read from system, and reboot into NT-4
We repeatedly ended up with dead NT-4 boots, while we could get NT-3.5 working. Later times with Windows 2000, XP etc have usually ended up with similar stories. While the support got better, the amount of eating the babies was still high enough that it is not commercially supportable.
Heck the amount of time I spent answering tickets that went like this was enough:
Customer: Your OS ate our HR system! We need it back right away. US: Be nice and calm customer down.. Customer (eventually); Well I installed 6.1 and then compiled the kernel with NTFS support to get the data off our HR system. US; well that was unsupported.. Customer: Well I am going to post to Slashdot about how crappy Red Hat support is. US: ok...
Customer posts bad experience (sans the part where they broke their kernel and used bad practices for moving data from a sensitive machine...)