30

September
2012

Problems with NTFS filesystem for Slax changes

I'm currently fighting strange problem. When Slax is started from USB device with FAT filesystem, everything works just fine. But if the usb drive uses NTFS, strange things happen.

In Slax, the ntfs drive is mounted using ntfs-3g, and then it is overmounted with posixovl to provide posix compatibility. Then, all system modifications (eg. firefox startup files, cache, etc) are stored in /slax/changes/ directory on the drive. However, it's very slow on ntfs. If you run firefox for example, and 'iostat -m 1' on xterm console, you'll see that the processor is 99% of time iowait-ing.

I have currently no solution for this problem. It is probably a problem of the ntfs-3g driver, since it doesn't happen with FAT (where only posixovl is used). Any suggestion will be really appreciated.

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