[Libguestfs] Re: Windows port of daemon?

[Matthew Booth]

On 01/12/09 17:26, Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:
>
> On Tue, 1 Dec 2009, Matthew Booth wrote:
>> On 01/12/09 16:29, Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:
>>> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 03:40:32PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>>>
>>>> The reason to want a Windows appliance at all is twofold: (1) better
>>>> support for NTFS filesystems and Windows-native filesystem features
>>>> (attributes, volume management etc)
>>>
>>> Could you please tell more technical details? We support NTFS attributes,
>>> volume management, etc for years. Thanks.
>>
>> For me, the principal driver is to use native software management tools,
>
> Native on Linux or Windows?
>
> We don't reimplement Windows NTFS tools on Linux (actually we were some
> years ahead in some of them) but try to make NTFS features available via
> common Linux interfaces.

Native on Windows. As far as we're concerned, Windows filesystem access 
from Linux is not a problem.

FWIW, we have only encountered one significant problem, which is that 
ntfs-3g is case sensitive, whereas Windows (but not ntfs itself) is not. 
The practical upshot of this is that if you read a path out of a 
configuration file on a Windows system and then attempt to use it, 
chances are it won't work because the case is wrong, which Windows 
doesn't care about. This requires a fairly disgusting hack for munging 
paths before use on Windows guests. If it were possible to supply a 
mount option to mount case-insensitive this would be a great help.

However, it's not going to help me install a new storage driver without 
reverse engineering Windows itself.

>> particular for driver installation. Native filesystem and volume management is
>> a bonus.
>>
>> Out of curiosity, who's 'we'?
>
> Linux-NTFS, NTFS-3G and Tuxera:
>   http://linux-ntfs.org
>   http://ntfs-3g.org
>   http://tuxera.com

Thanks,

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

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