2 # Captive project doc LinuxNTFS page Perl template.
3 # Copyright (C) 2003-2005 Jan Kratochvil <project-www.jankratochvil.net@jankratochvil.net>
5 # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
6 # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
7 # the Free Software Foundation; exactly version 2 of June 1991 is required
9 # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
10 # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
11 # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
12 # GNU General Public License for more details.
14 # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
15 # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
16 # Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
19 package project::captive::doc::LinuxNTFS;
20 require 5.6.0; # at least 'use warnings;' but we need some 5.6.0+ modules anyway
21 our $VERSION=do { my @r=(q$Revision$=~/\d+/g); sprintf "%d.".("%03d"x$#r),@r; };
31 BEGIN { Wuse 'project::captive::doc::Macros'; }
32 project::captive::doc::Macros->init(
33 "title"=>'Captive NTFS Developer Documentation: Captive vs. Linux-NTFS',
34 "rel_prev"=>'Related.pm',
41 <h1>Re: @{[ a_href 'http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#7.7',
42 "7.7 Can't we write a wrapper for Windows' driver?" ]}</h1>
44 <p class="re">> It sounds like a great idea, to start with, but there are numerous
47 <p><span class="re">> The largest technical problem is joining the Windows
48 system DLL to the Linux VFS. It could be done, but it wouldn't be pretty.</span><br />
51 <p><span class="re">> It would have to run as part of the kernel which would mean
52 that if it went wrong it could crash the machine. With no source, we might not
53 be able to work around the problem.</span><br />
54 @{[ a_href 'Details.pm#sandbox','Nope' ]},
55 @{[ a_href 'http://lufs.sourceforge.net/lufs/','Linux Userland File System (LUFS)' ]}
56 moves the filesystem implementation to UNIX userland where the Microsoft
57 Windows filesystem is completely unarmed by Captive jail of chroot(2),
58 setuid(2) and setrlimit(2). There only remains one narrow connection to the rest of
59 system (by CORBA/ORBit). The filesystem's life environment gets kill(2)ed when
60 UNIX is no longer satisfied with it. Safety similiar to
61 @{[ a_href 'http://www.vmware.com/solutions/security.html','VMware sandbox' ]}.</p>
63 <p><span class="re">> The next major problem is compati<!--orig. text typo-->bility.
64 Which version of the Windows system file would we use? Picking one would limit
65 its use, making the wrapper versatile for all of them would be a programming
66 nightmare.</span><br />
67 Microsoft Windows NTFS filesystem driver is capable of accessing older formats
68 of the filesystem. This project currently runs Microsoft Windows XP version,
69 porting to Microsoft Windows 2003 Server expected. (Microsoft Windows upgrades
70 NTFS disk filesystem to its own version during complete CD-ROM Microsoft
71 Windows system installation – such operation is not threat this project use.)</p>
73 <p><span class="re">> And it gets worse. The legal implications of
74 distributing Windows systems files would cause problems.</span><br />
75 User must be careful to obey all licensing restrictions according to his
76 local country laws.<br />
77 <span class="re">> Also the proprietary nature of the driver would mean that
78 the other kernel coders would not investigate any problems if someone had used
79 the NTFS wrapper.</span><br />
80 It does not apply to this project due to the implemented
81 @{[ a_href 'Details.pm#sandbox','filesystem separation' ]}.</p>