Filesystem Interoperablity between Win32 and Unix
 

Here's something I've been wonderin for a while. With ext2/3 and Reiser filesystems drivers being open and all, how come it's never occured to anyone to port them over to the win32 platform, even under cygwin? (Other than "win32 sux!")

No one's been the least bit curious?

Why would that not be trivial thing to do? Is it something to do with the differences between the way Windows and Unix do file permissions?

File systems can't simply be implemented on a userland environment like cygwin as they require kernel privileges. But there exist filesystem drivers which do that: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

ps: Believe it or not Windows actually supports a POSIX subsystem so the file permissions should be trivial to implement (suid/sgid may have some problems though). It's going the other way (Linux trying to access NTFS access-control lists) that is problematic.