NTFS Mounting does not work reliably on current versions of NetBSD

[thor0505%comcast.net@localhost]

Hello all (are we getting tired of me posting yet?), 

This is a long post, but it requires some background: 

Although I'm only capable of testing this on the Raspberry Pi for now, I can't 
duplicate this problem on Linux on the Pi. Therefore, I'll write to the mailing 
list for now to get some advice, and if this turns out to be a fuse/ntfs-3g 
bug, I'll submit a patch. 

I need to mount a NTFS external drive from my Raspberry Pi. For those who have 
not been following my previous posts ('pkg_add packages for evbearmv6hf-el: 
"Cannot execute ELF binary"'), the Raspberry Pi cannot currently execute NetBSD 
packages from evbarm pkgsrc repositories, so I need to compile it manually. 
There were two options I had- compile directly from source, or use the pkgsrc 
to automate the process/apply patches. 

This leads to the first issue... The pkgsrc version of fuse-ntfs-3g will not 
compile properly- specifically, due to the applied wrappers from -lfuse to 
-lrefuse. From my understanding, NetBSD provides its own fuse implementation- 
librefuse- which is essentially a wrapper for the original libpuffs 
implementation that solved the same problem as fuse. In 2011, a mailing list 
post brought to attention that then-current versions of lib-ntfs-3g required 
functions that librefuse did not supply, and Adam Hamsik provided a patch to 
add the missing functions. As of the February 15, 2014 version of ntfs-3g, this 
patch is no longer sufficient: 
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I/usr/pkg/include -DFUSE_USE_VERSION=26 
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/local/include/fuse -I../include/ntfs-3g -O2 
-I/usr/pkg/include -Wall -MT lowntfs_3g-lowntfs-3g.o -MD -MP -MF 
.deps/lowntfs_3g-lowntfs-3g.Tpo -c -o lowntfs_3g-lowntfs-3g.o `test -f 
'lowntfs-3g.c' || echo './'`lowntfs-3g.c 
lowntfs-3g.c:31:27: fatal error: fuse_lowlevel.h: No such file or directory 
#include lowlevel.h> 
^ 
compilation terminated. 
*** Error code 1 

Stop. 
make: stopped in 
/usr/pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g/work/ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs-2014.2.15/src 
*** Error code 1 

Stop. 
make[1]: stopped in /usr/pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g 
*** Error code 1 

Stop. 
make: stopped in /usr/pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g 

I'm unaware if even more headers are required which are missing.

Therefore, I decided to compile both libfuse and ntfs-3g manually, linking 
against my new libfuse instead of librefuse. As long as perfused is ran 
beforehand (ntfs-3g will fail ENOBUFS otherwise), I am capable of mounting my 
external hard drive, accessing, reading and writing files! However, if I 
attempt to do large reads or writes, such as checking out a CVS repository, all 
disk activity ceases and the data transfer never finishes. BOTH CVS verbose and 
ntfs-3g with the debug option indicate that the transfer has halted- i.e. there 
is NO diagnostic output at all. 

CTRL+C will get me back to the shell prompt, but ls will no longer return any 
directory entries on the mounted drive (indicating the drive is still not 
responding). Trying to unmount the drive will freeze the prompt, and while 
using SSH to reboot may work successfully, the reboot may freeze while waiting 
for the drive to respond, when it never does! The below shell script is what I 
use to show the behavior (run as root): 
#!/bin/sh 
NTFS3G_EXE=/bin/ntfs-3g 
MNT_SRC=/dev/sd0e 
MNT_TGT=/mnt/USBdisk 
TEST_DIR=$MNT_TGT/test_dir 

perfused 
$NTFS3G_EXE $MNT_SRC $MNT_TGT 
cd $MNT_TGT 
mkdir -p $TEST_DIR 
cd $TEST_DIR 
env CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -z2 -d anoncvs%anoncvs.NetBSD.org@localhost:/cvsroot 
checkout -P pkgsrc 
cd ~ 
umount $MNT_SRC #Incidentally, "device is busy" always the first umount. 
Second/third umount are okay. 

To duplicate my environment, ./configure fuse-2.9.3 with "--exec-prefix=/ 
(default /usr/local --prefix is okay)", and make and make install. Then, 
./configure ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs-2014.2.15 (no options needed, default /usr/local 
--prefix is okay), and make and make install. ntfs-3g should be in /bin. 


Is there any possibility this behavior is caused by linking against a fresh 
libfuse instead of linking against the librefuse provided with the NetBSD 
source? I'm considering recompiling the kernel with debugging options and using 
a kernel debugger for this- the ability for me to mount an NTFS drive is rather 
important and rather difficult to work around currently. 

As always, thanks for the help! 


Sincerely, 

-- 
William D. Jones