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Microsoft today announced that it:
is supporting the addition of Microsoft's exFAT technology to the Linux kernel.
Microsoft has published the exFAT file system specification on its Windows Dev Center site.
While the code remains under copyright, Microsoft also stated that the exFAT code incorporated into the Linux kernel will be available under GPLv2.
We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN's 3040+ members and licensees.
It is noteworthy that there is already a free and open source exFAT driver available for FreeBSD and multiple Linux distributions, but it is not an official part of the Linux kernel due to the patent encumbrance of exFAT.
Also at TechCrunch and VentureBeat.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 29 2019, @09:56PM (1 child)
> the exFAT file system is garbage and needs to go.
This. A long time ago, I tested the performance of a bunch of file systems. There were only slight variations between ext[234], xfs, zfs, btrfs, and a few others. But FAT (FAT32) stood out as much, much slower than all the rest. exFAT supposedly has some performance improvements.
Plain copying of critical data, as FAT does by having a duplicate File Allocation Table, is the most brain dead simple, wasteful, and ineffective way to guard against errors in the data. Any interruption during a write, such as by a power failure or removal of the medium, can unrecoverably corrupt a FAT file system more easily than just about any other file system. Then there's the hard size limits. From the 8.3 limit on the names from way back in the day, to the FAT32 4G file size limit and 65K directory entry limit, FAT's limits were always too low, requiring frequent modification as technology exceeded FAT's capacities again and again.
I have an all-in-one that can write scans to flash drives-- as long as the flash drive is formatted with FAT. But, must be careful. If there is not enough free space left on the flash drive, the device will just keep on writing, paving over critical file system structures, completely borking it.
If those technical deficiencies aren't enough to get FAT permanently discontinued, there's M$'s long history of leveraging patents on FAT to extort money from others. It's possible FAT's limits were purposely calculated to give M$ the excuse it needed to roll out a few fresh patents on the latest meager expansion of yet another limit. FAT would be dead and gone if it wasn't the default on flash drives, and if M$ Windows supported more than just FAT and NTFS. If we could format a flash drive with ext2, and it would just work in Windows, that would eliminate one of the few reasons left to use FAT. Possibly that would leave thee embedded world as the last holdout.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 30 2019, @12:09AM
From the 8.3 limit on the names from way back in the day, to the FAT32 4G file size limit and 65K directory entry limit, FAT's limits were always too low, requiring frequent modification as technology exceeded FAT's capacities again and again.
Oh, come on! Are you now gonna tell me 640K is not enough for everyone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford