NTFS now supports FileAttr changes with chattr command, good time to talk about how good NTFS3 support is nowadays. ^[1]

and you can also add the  "compressed" and "immutable" attribute to files ^[2]

NTFS3 driver now handle symlinks that are created under windows. it also now supports creating symlinks with relative paths. ^[3]

NTFS3 Now supports Pre-1970 Timestamps.

We know that Unix time starts on January 1st 1970 but NTFS wasn't made for Unix time.

It was possible for a valid NTFS file to have a timestamp from earlier than this limit.

The internal code of the driver couldn't manage these timestamp but the rewritten code allows for negative integers thus Pre-1970 timestamp.^[4]

optimizations like:

improve readahead for bitmap initialization and large directory scans^[5]

The new NTFS driver brings a first time support for windows symlink with ntfs.

In past drivers, the symlinks were made in different ways than the windows style one, making the symlinks made on one platform not compatible with the other.

The new implementation seeks to fix that.

You can now choose how symlinks are handled using a mount option.

symlink=wsl|native native being windows native.^[7]

The also added another mount option to control how absolute symlinks are handled:

native_symlink=raw|rel

raw = means just an absolute path starting from current root

rel = will make a relative symlink based on the volume's root

There was also some small optimization and hardening against corrupted on-disk metadata.^[6]