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by p_l 715 days ago
Arguably from the point of On Disk Structure (to reuse terminology from NTFS' ancestor in VMS), all attributes can have names as well.

Now, implementation in ntfs.sys is another thing and I have no idea if it's just an unused code path or if something would explode, and from what I heard Microsoft ended up in situation where people are scared to touch it not because of code quality but because of being scared of breaking something.
1 comments
skissane 715 days ago
> Now, implementation in ntfs.sys is another thing and I have no idea if it's just an unused code path or if something would explode,

ntfs.sys has validation checks in it which prevent you from directly creating anything other than named or unnamed $DATA attributes on a regular file, and named $DATA attributes on a directory, and (indirectly) creating other stuff (directories, file names, standard attributes, EAs) through the appropriate APIs. If you try to do anything funky, you'll get an "Access Denied" error code returned by ntfs.sys

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p_l 715 days ago
I was thinking more of "ntfs.sys encounters filesystem structure with names set for normally unnamed attributes".

The API preventing arbitrary messing up is a separate (and good and valid) concern.

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skissane 715 days ago
> I was thinking more of "ntfs.sys encounters filesystem structure with names set for normally unnamed attributes".

From reading the source code of the Linux kernel NTFS driver (the ntfs3 one in the latest Linux kernel, not the older one it replaced), its (pretty reasonable) strategy is just to ignore things it doesn't expect. But I don't know what ntfs.sys does in such a scenario, I've never tried.

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