Happy New Year!

This release should significantly improve write performance in several 
scenarios, thanks to the overwhelming problem reports and help related to 
this issue.

The speed increase is usually between 2-600 fold. Sometimes it's minimal 
but occasionally it could be quite drastic, e.g. in some tests the 
performance of sustained streaming of data to disk has changed from 50 kB/s 
to 30 MB/s.

Please note that the performance improvements need a lot of work. This is 
just the start. The CPU usage can be still very high but the work should be 
done (much) earlier compared to the former problematic cases.

Nautilus/gnomevfs has been also identified as having a filesystem 
independent performance bug and the only solution so far seems to 
be if it's not used but instead an alternative:

	http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363400

There are many questions why the driver is still BETA even if it's more 
reliable, usable and faster than some other stable softwares. Well, the 
NTFS-3G support page at

	http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html

still lists some issues which needs to be fix or implemented first. There 
is a quite definite roadmap, though releases, fixes, features are heavily 
influenced by the contributions, help, and feedbacks. Hence ...

What do __you__ think is missing for a stable release?

Please send your opinion either to ntfs-3g-devel@... (no 
subscription is required) or to me. Thank you in advance.

The major fixes in this beta are

    * fix: writing large files could be very slow
    * fix: writing several files at the same time could be very slow
    * fix: writing at several places into a file at the same time could be 
           very slow
    * fix: invalid argument error when writing randomly into a sparse files 

Contributors to this release and in the last two weeks: Dominique L Bouix, 
Miklos Szeredi, Florent Mertens, William Mc, Jonatan Lambert, Carsten 
Einig, Klaus Knopper, Martin Oehler, Pablo Bueti, Felipe Alvarez, William 
Crawford, Gabriel Lavoie, SteveM, Twisted_fall, Eustace. Thank you a lot.

The latest BETA driver can be downloaded from:

        http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html#download

Happy testing,
		Szaka

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