OpenBSD NTFS experience

[Ed Gray]

Hi,

Has anyone had experience using NTFS with OpenBSD and if so any
pointers particularly around performance and any problems encountered?

I realise NTFS is probably not used by many people but I have an
external drive which is formatted with it.

It would be useful to know if anyone is using the read-only NTFS
driver or ntfs-3g port successfully and if there are any known bugs
with these.

Regards
Ed Gray
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-gray-55079422

[Ed Gray]

Thanks for your reply Maurice,

I tried the read-only driver on an earlier version maybe 6.6 and it
crashed. I wasn't able to debug it myself but I suppose it could have been
my external hard drive, the NTFS version or a particular file that caused
that issue as it happened with a large data copy and a particularly large
file (multiple GB).

I'm finding poor performance with USB drives on 6.8 with a hard disk and a
card reader. It could be ntfs-3g with the hard drive but the card is FAT32.
I am wondering if it's to do with the default shm kernel variables or
maxfiles and such. It causes various hangs in thunar file manager.

I previously had increased shm variables because of a KDE application
recommending it for lots of file accesses.

I know ntfs-3g is using FUSE rather than a native driver.

Regards
Ed Gray

On Sun, 21 Feb 2021, 6:51 pm Maurice McCarthy, <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Native read-only support is excellent.
> I find writing with ntfs-3g quite a lot slower than native Windows
> Best
>

[Ed Gray]

My latest issue with NTFS was that my external drive stopped
responding and caused Thunar to hang. After this my entire session
hung until I killed it with Ctrl + Alt+ backspace.

It seems the rsync data copy I did completely properly but the mount
stopped responding after some time of the PC being unused. Any
attempts to access the mounted directory caused a hang of the terminal
or process.

I  can now see with atactl that my USB hard drive supports power
management and looks to be in standby mode when not in use. I am
wondering if maybe the drive goes into standby or powers down and that
causes the mount to stop working or if it is a bug in NTFS-3G support
or something else.

This time I am going to run ntfs-3g with the debug mode enabled in
no_detach to determine if there are any errors when the drive is left
connected but unused.

It outputs the following on successful mount:

Version 2017.3.23 external FUSE 26
Mounted /dev/sd2i (Read-Write, label "SAMSUNG", NTFS 3.1)
Cmdline options: no_detach
Mount options: allow_other,nonempty,relatime,fsname=/dev/sd2i,blkdev,blksize=4096
Ownership and permissions disabled, configuration type 1

Regards
Ed Gray
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-gray-55079422

On Sun, 21 Feb 2021 at 19:15, Ed Gray <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> Thanks for your reply Maurice,
>
> I tried the read-only driver on an earlier version maybe 6.6 and it crashed. I wasn't able to debug it myself but I suppose it could have been my external hard drive, the NTFS version or a particular file that caused that issue as it happened with a large data copy and a particularly large file (multiple GB).
>
> I'm finding poor performance with USB drives on 6.8 with a hard disk and a card reader. It could be ntfs-3g with the hard drive but the card is FAT32. I am wondering if it's to do with the default shm kernel variables or maxfiles and such. It causes various hangs in thunar file manager.
>
> I previously had increased shm variables because of a KDE application recommending it for lots of file accesses.
>
> I know ntfs-3g is using FUSE rather than a native driver.
>
> Regards
> Ed Gray
>
> On Sun, 21 Feb 2021, 6:51 pm Maurice McCarthy, <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Native read-only support is excellent.
>> I find writing with ntfs-3g quite a lot slower than native Windows
>> Best