manu's blog

Szaka announced the release of user land read-write driver for NTFS on linux-ntfs-dev mailing list on July 14th, 2006. This is a user land driver and it makes use of fuse . Fuse is a linux module which provides facility to write filesystems in user space. It seems that this driver is quite stable and provides better option than captive-ntfs. Good news for BackTrackers, huh? :-). I have complied ntfs-3g beta module for backtrack-v1. Backtrack comes with fuse kernel module, but I had to compile fuse tools and library to compile ntfs-3g. Here are the links to the modules: http://manugarg.googlepages.com/ntfs-3g-20070714-BETA-i386.mo http://manugarg.googlepages.com/fuse-2.5.3-i386.mo I have done some basic testing using these modules and things look fine. Hope you will find these modules helpfull. To start using it: -Load fuse module using: modprobe fuse -Mount windows filesystem using: mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows More information about ntfs-3g can be found in the announcement

Reporting from linux kernel land, Starting with version 2.5, linux kernel introduced a new system call entry mechanism on Pentium II+ processors. Why this new mechanism? Well, somebody reported performances issues with system calls on Pentium IV processors. Apparently, the system call mechanism based on software interrupts was responsible for this performance lag. Linux, or Linus more specifically, responded by implementing an alternative system call mechanism. This mechanism made use of SYSENTER/SYSEXIT instructions available on Pentium II+ processors to implement system call entry and exit. This articles explores this new mechanism. If I have made any general statement, i.e. not mentioned specific architecture, please make a mental note that I am talking about Pentium processors. Also, all source code listings are based on the kernel i.e. 2.6.15.6 (that's the kernel on backtrack v1.0). Here is the link: http://articles.manugarg.com/systemcallinlinux2_6.html I explored t