NTFS updated write support

[Chris Brown]

Hello Folks,

The linux-ntfs project maintainer has released a new version which is in 
1639 and onwards. It contains the following updated funtionality:

The new features as explained in the mailing list are:

Given an existing uncompressed and unencrypted file, you can use:

- write(2) to write to the file, including beyond the end of the
existing file, and the file will be extended appropriately.  Both
resident and non-resident files are supported.  Support for heavily
fragmented files still has some limitations but you will just get an
EOPNOTSUPP error if you hit one.  Everything will still be consistent on
the volume.  Sparse files can also be written to and holes will be
filled in appropriately.

- truncate(2) and ftruncate(2) to change the size of the file, inlcuding
using open(2) with O_TRUNC flag.  As with write(2) there still are some
limitations for heavily fragmented files, and as above, everything will
still be consistent on the volume if you hit an unsupported case.  Note,
that no sparse regions are created yet as this requires directory
operations to be implemented, too, which they are not yet.  This is not as
bad as it sounds as the regions are allocated but not initialized at the
time of the truncate call so it is still very fast.  Though a subsequent
write then needs to initialize the space so may be slow...

What this means is that you can now run your favourite editor on an
existing file, e.g. "vim /ntfs/somefile.txt" works fine and you can save
your changes.  Also things like running OpenOffice and editing existing MS
Office documents works.  Basically anything that does not need to create
temporary files in the same directory as the document should work fine
now.

Still not supported features are creation/deletion of files/directories
and mmap(2) based writes to sparse regions of files.  (The mmap(2)
support has not been modified since the last release, only the file
write(2) support was rewritten.)

Therefore if anyone running rawhide current with dual boot would like to 
test this, feedback would be greatly appreciated. It has been in -mm for a 
while with no complaints and the dev feels its ready for mainline.
   Now of course we know NTFS is a bit of a taboo around here but isnt that 
what makes it so exciting? To get the rpm to enable it please visit:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora5dev.html

Cheers
Chris

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