Comment 3 for bug 232443

CPU usage:

- Until very recently Ubuntu indeed used an old, very CPU consuming driver.
- The NTFS-3G CPU usage is visible in the process list which is not true for kernel drivers. This makes some people think that the driver uses a lot of CPU even if sometimes it uses less than the in-kernel Linux file systems.
- Some more are listed on http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#cpu100
- The priority of the project is reliability. When we must chose between stability/correctness or performance then we always select the first one. No exception. We improve performance only if it doesn't impact the formers in any way.
- The driver is not optimized yet. This will happen when the time comes.

Sluggish directory listing:

Well, nobody reported this yet. Probably you mean latency. NTFS-3G indeed reads all files before showing the first one. So the delay usually is longer but afterwards it must be smoother.

Kernel/user-space difference:

Yes, there are quite a lot of myths unfortunately. Some short reading:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/18/136

Data corruptions with 'ro' drivers:

All kernel drivers are in the same, unprotected address space. If one has a bug then anything can go wrong anywhere. These do happen all the time. More readings: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~swift/

Regards, Szaka