After more than two years of development, the release of WinBtrfs 1.10 has been announced. This project develops a driver for the Btrfs file system to be used on the Windows platform. Unlike other drivers, WinBtrfs is not based on the Btrfs code from the Linux kernel; instead, it is an alternative implementation developed from scratch. The driver supports Windows XP and newer editions and is included with the ReactOS operating system. It enables users to boot Windows from a partition with Btrfs. The code is written in C/C++ and is distributed under the LGPLv3 license.
WinBtrfs supports most features of the Linux version of Btrfs, such as asynchronous writing and reading, RAID support, caching, auto-discovery of partitions, ACLs, symbolic links, snapshots, hard links, data integrity checking, and more. Noteworthy features include the implementation of alternative data flowsand mapping of user IDs between Linux and Windows. Additionally, converting existing NTFS partitions to Btrfs is possible.
The new version of WinBtrfs includes several changes and improvements:
- Added support for writing bitmaps with free location information.
- Implemented the ability to save small files in compressed form in blocks with metadata.
- Improved support for working with removable drives.
- Increased reliability in recovering from errors due to out-of-memory or drive-out-of-space situations.
- Fixed crashes that occurred