Had a play with encrypted ntfs directories and the ntfs 3.x extended system files. Adapted ntfs tng to cope with both and found a buglet in the process. Now all is happy.
Had a look at the compile warnings report for linux-ntfs 1.5.1 for powerpc. It seems powerpc use char == unsigned char which was breaking some signed char comparisons. Fixed that. Now need a powerpc person to test. (-;
More NTFS TNG hacking. Added the new inode allocation super operations, the recent show_options so we have a cool /proc/mounts output, etc. This was followed by a four hour debug session involving repeated smacks of head against wall to find in the end the oops on mount problem was due to a buffer overrun caused by a cut and paste error in the new inode allocator... Fixing that it all worked a treat which prompted me to do a 0.0.5 release before I break it again. (-8
Went to visit friend in Chesham for a games day. Lots of fun. (-: Picked up four Roger Zelazny books I haven't read yet, now I just need the time to read them. (-8
On the NTFS TNG front, finished the second lot of changes and made some cleanups at the same time so the total diff was about the size of the whole driver. (-; Started converting tng to the new ->alloc_inode/- >destroy_inode super block ops and realized that these mean that every ntfs_inode automatically has a vfs_inode which means I can undo a lot of the changes done to divorce the two as doing it the New Way(TM) means we have both anyway. Another set of big changes is appearing on the horizont...
Received debian packages of linux-ntfs 1.5.0 and put them on Sourceforge. With them came a report of compiler warnings and errors from compiling on various architectures. That led me to find and fix two small bugs in ntfsfix and to fixup logfile.h which I had forgotten to cleanup before. Hopefully now it really will compile on all arch, so released linux-ntfs 1.5.1.
Al Viro had a look at NTFS TNG a few days ago and had several suggestions/comments on what should be modified to make it prettier and to make it acceptable for kernel inclusion. Started making the changes. The first change, to rewrite (un)map_mft_record() to use read_cache_page() instead of the deep VM magic was easy, and removed all the VM/VFS exports Al didn't like which made the core kernel patch about 2/3 smaller. The second change, to stop using struct inode * for extent inodes, and just using ntfs_inode * for them is turning into a major rewrite as the driver always accepts struct inode * as argument to functions instead of ntfs_inode *, so about half of the driver needs to be rewritten. Also i_generation and i_ino have to be moved to ntfs_inode *. But it is well worth the effort as it removes iget_no_wait() which was just ugly and with this the core kernel patch becomes only a trivial modification to kernel/ksyms.c to export end_buffer_io_sync().
Long time no entry. Oh, well. An eventful Christmas/New Year vacation which I spent with my sister in France is over. Full with my sister's and her boyfriend's cars catching fire, burning down of their house, subsequent police interrogations, what fun... )-: At least no-one got hurt so we were all lucky in that respect. And as it turned out, accoring to the police investigators, the fire starter was my sister's car - battery leaked and a discharge caused the fire to start. Apparently this can happen to any car but the probability of it occuring is extremely small. Obviously above zero though. I feel like I was part of an action movie for a week...
Back to normal in good old England, got round to releasing linux-ntfs 1.5.0. Several changes had accumulated in cvs so it was about time especially as I found a mkntfs bug relating to the size of the created journal which I fixed.
Spent last night chasing weird bug that appeared in kernel 2.5.1-pre2 and resulted in hda2 starting one sector too early on my development machine. Turned out to be a really weird compile problem which is now fixed. (-:
Continued work on attribute list support in NTFS TNG which is moving along slowly.
Calm weekend as I am sick (but getting better). Got round to implementing transparent decompression support in NTFS TNG and testing it successfully on two files. Way cool. (-8
The ToDo list for completing read support shrinks further and further. Only two big points left before it's ready for 2.5.x inclusion.
After discovering some mkntfs bugs with large clusters and noticing ntfsfix was refusing to run on NTFS 3.1 partitions, quickly fixed all bugs, hacked on mkntfs some more to add support for floppies and determining the device size using a binary lseek search.
Then played with the result for a few hours and released it as Linux-NTFS 1.4.0 (download from the Linux-NTFS home page).
Decided to put my vmware 2.x patches which make the modules compile on kernels 2.4.9+ on the web as I keep getting requests for them. You can get them here.
Finally fixed the NTFS TNG hangs in the Linus VM kernels after Andrew Morton pointed me to the right place. I am happy! (-:
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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