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exFAT in the Linux kernel
- goatinaboat 7y agoGreat news! But I would have delayed announcing it until I had the patches ready to be merged.
- hnarn 7y agoI don't mean for this question to sound inflammatory but I can't help but think: why does this matter? You can already use exFAT on Linux via FUSE, and as pointed out by VentureBeat: > To be clear, Microsoft isn’t open-sourcing exFAT — but it is making sure anyone building with Linux can use it. 'It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence.' exFAT is still not open source, and still can't be distributed with the kernel. So what changed? It will now be easier to integrate it into a custom kernel instead of using FUSE? Why is this better than the current situation, where you'd install exfat-utils for example? Are there benefits of using a kernel module that I'm missing which makes this important news?
- vengefulduck 7y agoBut they can put their own implementation of exfat inside the kernel now without worrying about patents, which is what previously prevented it from being included. I will also help that they will have an official spec to go off of now, so they won’t have to waste time with reverse engineering (plus the legal concerns that comes with that).
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 7y agolegality and implementation straight on linux kernel would be the first thing I'd say.
- gvb 7y agoAccording to John Gossman "Microsoft Distinguished Engineer & Linux Foundation Board Member" in a related announcement, Microsoft plans to contribute it to the Linux kernel: 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. Still some patent squirrelly words (they imply you have to sign a patent cross licensing agreement with the OIN - not sure of the implications) and no timeline. Ref: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-kernel/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat... OIN Ref: https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/ https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/
- WorldMaker 7y agoMost of the major Linux distributions are directly members or licensees of the OIN already. It looks like any distribution that isn't can get a license by filling out a form, no money needed and royalty-free. To my reading, the OIN is a "mutually assured destruction" organization for patents around Linux that owns some of the patents outright and basically tries to insure that if any member sues another member or licensee over any of their patents the OIN itself and all the other members should band together and counter-sue over the remainder of the patents. It seems an interesting nuclear option to protect Linux from patent lawsuits.
- Boulth 7y agoThe list definitely is long but I don't see Debian or Archlinux there: https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/community-of-licensees/ https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/community-of-licensees/
- ldng 7y agoWell at least they did not deny patent issues. As for the driver, a community one is already on the way so they'll probably just piggyback on it. Or, if they want to contribute an official driver, they should have contribute it at the same time as the spec, IMO.
- garaetjjte 7y agoFUSE is very slow compared to kernel module.
- fooker 7y agoCitation needed.
- 693471 7y agoI don't think we need a citation for common knowledge about how OS kernels work
- mackman 7y agoI’ve been building SD card based Pi devices and the limiting factor in IO perf is the FUSE exFat implementation. There’s a leaked Samsung internal implementation that is over 2x as fast in my benchmarks. I can’t attest whether it’s the fact it’s FUSE or just other performance optimizations that is the reason though.
- rahuldottech 7y agoThe leaked kernel was apparently later open sourced [1], although I can't actually find it on the official samsung website. [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzODQ https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzODQ
- mises 7y agoDoing things in-kernel is almost always faster. No dealing with complicated context-switching, moving memory back-and-forth, etc. I can't necessarily provide a formal, data-backed citation, but it's pretty well understood.
- cesarb 7y ago> why does this matter? You can already use exFAT on Linux via FUSE It means that exFAT will be available everywhere. For instance, right now if you want exFAT support on Fedora or RHEL, you have to enable rpmfusion and install fuse-exfat and exfat-utils from there; once it's in the upstream kernel, it will be available on a default install.
- gregkh 7y agoIt will be in the "real" kernel soon, here is a patch I submitted adding it: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190828160817.6250-1-gregkh@linuxfoundation.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190828160817.6250-1-gregkh@li... And yes, this is _much_ better than using a FUSE interface to the filesystem.
- ghostpepper 7y agoFor the 99% of people reading who don't know the kernel as well as you (seriously) can you explain why this is the case? Does a userspace filesystem driver lose a lot of performance to context switching, or is there something unique to filesystems that slows them down in user space?
- gregkh 7y ago> Does a userspace filesystem loose a lot of performance... Yes. Try the two versions out, and see for yourself if you are curious.
- dekhn 7y agoI use a FUSE filesystem on linux- not ExFAT, but as an S3 interface. I often see 1+Gigabyte/sec throughput over the wire from simple multithreaded IO operations. FUSE can be very fast.
- notriddle 7y agoFor one thing, that's throughput, not latency. For another, that's probably a desktop, not a smartphone.
- dekhn 7y agoThat's correct, my metric for performance is throughput I don't really think a desktop vs a smartphone matters much at this comparison, it's just my observation that when people say a fuse filesystem is slow it's just not well-engineered, not that the fuse API is inherently slow
- thetinguy 7y agoexFAT will also be available on other devices like cameras android phones
- yc12340 7y agoCare to explain how? Microsoft isn't giving away it's exFAT patents. They are merely suggesting, that everyone licensed them at Microsoft's own terms. Those terms include becoming a member of Microsoft-sponsored patent ring and agreeing to it's terms and conditions: https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/oin-license-agreement/ https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/oin-license.... The conditions can be changed anytime (!!) and the patent license terminates if you sue Microsoft or any other OIN member for any patent violations whatsoever. Nikon, ZTE, Xiaomi, Samsung and thousands of others (basically all, who were or still are patent-trolled by Microsoft) haven't magically become members of OIN, and it's unclear if they ever will. Google and Red Hat are members, but neither produces any devices with external SD-cards...
- zamalek 7y agoThe big deal here is that they are placing the patent into OIN - I'm probably correct in guessing that it is now the most powerful patent in the OIN arsenal. More electronics/software shops are going to be pressured to join the OIN. Consider sharing files on physical media and, oh, that UEFI basically uses FAT. Patent trolls are probably collectively experiencing a migraine after this news.
- paule89 7y agoAlso hope that uefi will soon use exfat. Still better than plain old fat.
- gambiting 7y agoBecause Fuse is slooow - I've had an external Exfat drive mounted on Raspberry Pi 4 and writing large amount of data would pretty much max out the CPU. Ext3/4 has no such issue, I can write to it for days without taxing the CPU. Apparently it's a known problem with Fuse partitions, NFTS-3G has the same problem.
- jdsully 7y agoThe big deal here is the patent grant. FAT related patents were held over linux like a gun in the Ballmer years. Its a reason Linux was stuck with 8.3 length filenames for so long.
- taffer 7y agoAren't the FAT patents about to expire anyway?
- WorldMaker 7y agoSome of the earliest ones, surely, but presumably Microsoft also continued to patent later innovations: all of the "extended" in ExFAT.
- viraptor 7y agoThis seems to be one of the patents involved: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=2008168029&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP# https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC... I'm not sure what's the expiry on 2008 submission.
- loeg 7y ago20 years from invention? Which looks like ~2004 skimming the 2008 filing.
- pkaye 7y agoThe original ones from the MSDOS days should have long expired. The one with VFAT/FAT32 from the Windows 95 era should have expired a few years back. I think exFAT is probably the last one remaining.
- taffer 7y agoYes I forgot that exFAT is a whole new thing from 2008.
- jaclaz 7y agoThe IMHO extremely relevant point is in the very end of the actual specifications: https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-... >26-Aug-2019 Seventh release of the Basic Specification, which includes the following changes: Updated legal terms pertaining to the specification, including: Removal of Microsoft Confidential notice Removal of Microsoft Corporation Technical Documentation License Agreement section Updated copyright notice to 2019 Till now the documentation wasn't AFAIK publicly available or it was anyway "restricted".
- userbinator 7y agoSkimming through the doc, it looks like a modification of FAT32 with some (noticeably more complex) extensions, and not anything resembling what you might envision a "FAT64" to be; a FAT is still a linked list of 32-bit entries, there can still be two of them, and directory entries are still 32 bytes each (although defined in a rather complex way.) There's a separate allocation bitmap, which seems redundant and a waste of space (and code) given that the FAT itself already contains the information in previous versions. I've written a FAT12/16/32 driver for an embedded system before; and oddly enough, the documentation I had at the time was far easier to understand than this one. I didn't expect exFAT to be this complex, or perhaps the doc is just excessively verbose --- for example, the whole first paragraph of the 4th section is saying nothing more than "there may be 1 or 2 FATs, one after the other, and NumberOfFats is the field that says how many there are" except it takes 5 sentences to do so. That said, this spec is written in a style that's easier to understand than a lot of the other "open specifications" docs that MS has released, but I suspect that's because this one was once an actual NDA'd implementer's document rather than the others which I've heard may have been released purely for legal reasons related to the antitrust than anything else. Now if only they'll do this for NTFS...
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoWith how slow modern day NTFS is for things like node_modules (lots of nested directories), I can't help but hope some better file system will become widespread on the next major Windows release.
- dang 7y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20821161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20821161
- buildbuildbuild 7y agoToo little too late, with no acknowledgement of Ballmer-era exclusivity, bullying. It’s progress, but progress without awareness of baggage in the room.
- The_rationalist 7y agoAlmost every months Microsoft make a more or less major gift to the open source community, this is beautiful. They are the new "benevolent" Google and it's no surprise they're now the number one open source contributor of the world.
- TwoNineA 7y agoThey already extorted Android OEMs using exFat patents for billions, might as well try to look nice.
- MaupitiBlue 7y agoI always chuckled at the joke: Who makes more money off of the sale of each Android device, Google or Microsoft?
- mtgx 7y agoExactly. They are likely doing this because smartphone makers were already moving away from supporting as cards. The patents will likely expire soon too.
- swiley 7y agoAs much as I hate the patent bullying Android should have never used FAT for ANYTHING. The stupidity around that continues to make everyone's lives hard to this day.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoIf you want an SD card that is also readable by the digital camera ecosystem, what choice do you have?
- jdnenej 7y agoHow often are people taking a microSD card from their camera and putting it in their phone considering on a lot of devices this means pulling the battery out. Also they could support fat while not having the main system storage using fat.
- whalesalad 7y agoSweet. I had to purchase something for my Synology NAS fairly recently to support an ExFAT device. It’s great to see this contribution to open source.
- tambourine_man 7y agoOMG, I can't believe we finally have a cross platform read/write disk format. At last. No more Fuse. I just need to know when it will be available for my Raspberry Pi.
- pwg 7y agoWe already have one, it is just that few know we do: Universal Disk Format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format). I can confirm it works on Linux, and works on Windows (at least W10). The wikipedia article indicates it works on newer MacOS'es, but I can't confirm that fact.
- etatoby 7y agoI've been using UDF formatted flash drives for a long time (10 years?) and they've been working on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X all this time.
- tambourine_man 7y agoI thought it was for optical media only. Yet, it seems there's no way to format to it out of box on macOS and support looks dodgy. I'm not willing to bet my data on an unreliable file system implementation.
- pwg 7y ago> I thought it was for optical media only. Nope, although it is most commonly used on optical media it is not restricted to only optical media. From the wikipedia article: Specifications The UDF standard defines three file system variations, called "builds". These are: Plain (Random Read/Write Access). This is the original format supported in all UDF revisions ... Plain build Introduced in the first version of the standard, this format can be used on any type of disk that allows random read/write access, such as hard disks, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM media. Metadata (up to v2.50) and file data is addressed more or less directly. In writing to such a disk in this format, any physical block on the disk may be chosen for allocation of new or updated files. Since this is the basic format, practically any operating system or file system driver claiming support for UDF should be able to read this format.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoThanks MS. Would also like to see ext4 support in Windows and better NTFS support under Linux. Then the turnaround (on the technical side at least) will be complete.
- wpdev_63 7y agoBring btrfs to windows pls!
- pedrocr 7y agoI'll believe Microsoft loves Linux when I can install Microsoft Office in my desktop Linux machine. Everything else is marketing. Edit: to expand, the corporate world runs on Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook. Microsoft milks them on Windows/Office licensing and is very aggressive against organizations that try to do Linux deployments. They're a convicted monopolist that got away easily when at some point the option on the table was to split OS and Office into two different companies. If they want to continue to use Office to keep Windows dominant that's their strategy. WSL and their other "love Linux" efforts are all about making sure developers stay on Windows. If you want to do all that fine but don't patronize us by then claiming you love Linux.
- growse 7y agoThis seems oddly specific and arbitrary. What if the engineering effort in porting it over is not economically viable?
- Macha 7y agoGiven the direction they're going with the web versions of Office 365, it's entirely possible that the future involves them deciding porting stuff to the Windows version is not economically viable and relegate the native apps to legacy support like IE.
- akeck 7y agoI've been 100% Office 365 web apps on Linux Chromium since around February. So far, I haven't hit a situation that has required spinning up my Windows 10 VM.
- cbcoutinho 7y agoWhat do you do when you want to edit a document or compose an email offline?
- skinnymuch 7y ago
- rhn_mk1 7y agoDoes this affect anything outside the Linux kernel? Will *BSDs be able to use the specs without patent fears? What about microcontrollers, and the Arduino community?
- Conan_Kudo 7y agoNo. The OIN promise only applies to Linux-based systems.
- derefr 7y agoWhat defines a "Linux-based system"? Does Android count? Would VMWare's VSphere ESXi hypervisor count? Would a unikernel running on a pared-down Linux rump-kernel (if such a thing were made) count?
- progval 7y agoAccording to http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents , GPLv2 includes an implicit patent grant So my guess would be that the definition of "derivative work" would apply.
- bubblethink 7y agoSo the code in the linux kernel would have to be signed off/committed by MS in that case, right ? For a grant to have any meaning, the code would need to come from them ?
- monocasa 7y agoThat's super duper grey area, which is why GPLv3 went out of it's way to have an explicit patent grant.
- mdolan1 7y agoOIN works with the Linux kernel community to define a "Linux System Definition" that has tables of packages and functionality covered. New functionality is added every year. It does not include proprietary software or components. https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/linux-system/ https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/linux-syste...
- bubblethink 7y agoAny news on NTFS ?
- benbristow 7y agoNTFS-3g is pretty good and support on Linux is definitely a lot better than it used to be. Still, official (or officially supported/documented) support would be really nice. Honestly I hope even Windows abandons NTFS soon. It's the worst part of using Windows. e.g. Try and develop any Node project on Windows and it's painful - takes literally minutes to delete the node_modules folder whereas on Linux/Mac it takes seconds. It only recently got long pathname support (260+ chars long)...
- GordonS 7y agoOn the other side, file ACLs in NTFS are way more powerful than the Linux owner-group-world model.
- Someone1234 7y agoThat's true. But NTFS could also improve rather than simply adopting Linux's filesystems. Heck they could improve it then Open Source the new thing.
- GordonS 7y agoI think ReFS was supposed to be the next-gen version of NTFS, but it never really got much use.
- grumpydba 7y agoYou can use posix acls whenever you want though.
- amaccuish 7y agoPosix acls aren't particularly nice though. RichACLs is what I'd love but they're not merged :(
- mda 7y agoSo after abusing this bullshit for more than a decade to bully companies. How gracious and generous of them. Oh btw, Satya is the CEO for 5 years.
- GordonS 7y agoI think that's pretty unfair - Microsoft has changed enormously in the past 5 years.
- msftlvslicnsing 7y agoVSCode, exFat, and .Net core are not enormous. Their revenue streams are enormous and remain as close to their chest as ever.
- immigrantsheep 7y agoSo they should start losing money? Should Google? Should Apple? I don't get this argument. And .Net Core being open source is enormous if you use it.
- rswail 7y agoThe system I just implemented is using .Net Core on Ubuntu on AWS/VMWare and is happily processing lots of transit trips a day. Licensing costs are $0. .Net Core brings MS's equivalent to Java to Linux and enables the use of a better language set (C#/F#) and allows for a relatively seamless development experience. What's not to like?
- msftlvslicnsing 7y ago>So they should start losing money? I was unclear; their revenue streams are still overwhelmingly comprised of proprietary tech. Darwin and AOSP are massive compared to the toys MSFT is throwing over the Linux wall. This idea that they need to lose money is a strawman.
- bdcravens 7y ago
- mmorearty 7y agoembrace, extend, exFAT
- wcchandler 7y agoI haven't spun up anything in Azure for quite a while. Does anybody know if their default images use anything exFAT formatted? Doesn't UEFI/EFI binaries usually sit on exFAT?
- whereistimbo 7y agoBy standard VFAT is required, but on most Windows PC, the UEFI partition is in NTFS.
- vetinari 7y agoUEFI partition is FAT32 (or EFI-FAT; EFI has their own specification of FAT, frozen in time, with it's own identifier), if not for other reason, that most UEFI implementations would not be able to boot from NTFS. Windows installer creates several partitions: System (ESP), MSR at the beginning of the disk and Recovery at the end of the disk.
- whereistimbo 7y agoMost UEFI implementations are loaded on Intel Windows devices, which is most likely to use TianoCore, reference implementation of UEFI which includes UEFI NTFS driver by default. I have seen that some low ends from Lenovo and Acer have its UEFI partition (ESP) formatted as NTFS.
- vetinari 7y agoAre you sure? I had a look into edk2 and cannot find NTFS driver there. I can see the FAT one. The NTFS support depends on device. From devices that I have around, Intel NUCs do support it, Asrock X399 board does not. I have yet to see the Windows installer to create NTFS-based ESP partition. If manufacturer does that for specific device (where it is guaranteed, that it will support NTFS), that's different thing.
- jasonhansel 7y ago"We love Linux so much that we would never let it be polluted by our horrible desktop software!"
- ausjke 7y agowan't Samsung providing a GPL-version of exFAT for Linux already? what's the difference assuming this news means we will have a native exFAT driver in kernel "soon". Is exFAT only good for file storage considering it has no journal ling? putting rootfs on it may have a dysfunction system relatively easily without fsck I assume.
- paule89 7y agoSamsung only had used a gpl version of exfat (mainly for android) and was forced to open source it, (or someone just did, although they did not want to admit it was gpl). This lead to development of a fuse module for linux. Which can be installed. I myself never had luck using it.
- finchisko 7y agoI have extensive (bad) experience with exFAT implemntation on other platforms than Windows. My external disk formatted as exFAT gets constantly corrupted (need fsck), when used on macOS and Linux. On Linux I use this Samsung's exfat-nofuse kernel driver on raspberry pi. ExFAT fs is mounted read-only and still get corrupted. So I don't share the excitement with most folks here. Until driver gets better, exFAT is not rock solid option for sharing data between OSes.
- Canadauni 7y agoIs it worth formatting my external flash media as exFAT at this point if I find myself dual booting often? NTFS on Ubuntu is pretty well covered so that has been what I have been using. But if exFAT support is improving I'm wondering if it is worth switching over.
- shmerl 7y agoFinally. Next steps — MS can release active sync without patents, and also start supporting Vulkan and drop DirectX 12 diversion.
- postit 7y agoMS wants a native kernel fs compatible with Windows so they can improve WSL. Today's virtualized kernel pays an unecessary price to access ext4 FS
- xvilka 7y agoMeanwhile, ntfs-3g[1] wasn't updated for years and looks like totally dead. Last version is of March 28, 2017. [1] https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/ https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/
- dkh 7y agoBig deal! This is right up there with Adobe Premiere on Windows finally getting a ProRes encoder at the top of my list of "Things That Would've Helped My FilmTech Career Around 6 years ago". 1) We finally have a file system that works across operating systems, which is a big deal if you ever do anything in a multi-OS environment. 2) exFAT is heavily used in the film production world, and the convenience of knowing it'll mount properly on any OS so you can duplicate it a few times is much more important than whether or not it's a "safer" file system in general. It doesn't need to survive forever -- the card just has to make it from the camera to the computer on the other side of the set, or survive a trip from one office to another on a shuttle drive that by this point is not the only place that data exists. Regardless, it's still more mature in general than I remember it when it started to appear in high-end cameras around 2012/2013. When your Blackmagic camera shoots exFAT but isn't capable of deleting files off it without a computer... 3) Should something still go wrong (like, oh, the time I was almost responsible for losing $60k of footage my second day on a job due to unexpected use of exFAT + a truly unfortunate and odd-defying day of bad luck) the fact that Microsoft is implementing it in the kernel should still be a huge help -- it will be a proper implementation (not a reverse-engineered sometimes-working mess), will perform much better than FUSE, and just generally improve reliability. Trust me, when your card with irreplaceable footage won't mount, you'd rather not have to fight that battle on two fronts, with one of them being your Linux implementation.
- userbinator 7y agofact that Microsoft is implementing it in the kernel should still be a huge help If you're trying to recover video (which is one of the easiest types of data to recover, due to it being large, sequentially written, and bitstreams containing easily recognisable sync markers), and especially from a storage device that's being exclusively used for video, the actual filesystem doesn't really matter because practically all of the sane ones will store the file data in a contiguous range of blocks. Depending on the exact codec, you may even be able to dd the raw device into a decoder and it'll simply find the first valid sync marker and start decoding from there.
- dkh 7y ago
- newscracker 7y agoWhen will we have a modern file system that “just works” for read and write on Windows, Linux and Mac without the need to buy some proprietary product or depend on some open source option that may not be maintained or 100% reliable? Seems like going over the network is the easiest option for people who use multiple OSes, though it comes with incompatibilities in permissions, ownership and also comes with a speed hit. I doubt if Apple would provide implementations of APFS for non-Apple operating systems. So that probably leaves Microsoft to push NTFS (since ReFS isn’t a common option anymore as per Wikipedia) if it desires. But Microsoft seems to be on a cost cutting mode (cf the adoption of Chromium in Edge). Are there viable and good options suitable for these three operating systems?
- angrygoat 7y agoexFAT works on MacOS >= 10.6.5, Windows and with this announcement hopefully shortly on Linux. I'd say it counts as a modern file system too - only released in 2006.
- shmerl 7y agoI'd count "modern", as something like btrfs, zfs or bcahefs.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoIt already does in Linux albeit not by default, it needs exFAT-utils and in android Paragon has the app with license for exFAT.
- yrro 7y agoDoesn't UDF work?
- legulere 7y agoLast time I tried it didn’t „just work“ across operating systems, with each showing different issues.
- dis-sys 7y agoI will believe Microsoft loves Linux when they decide to drop the development of their buggy NT kernel and starts to build windows on top of the mainline Linux kernel. Everything else is just cheap marketing.
- rswail 7y ago"buggy NT kernel" is a stretch. There's nothing particularly wrong about the NT kernel in its design or implementation, any more than other kernels. MS don't have to drop Windows to support Linux. They can walk and chew gum at the same time.
- mikorym 7y agoI remember having had problems with exFAT on linux. Did it not work at all, or did you have to use user repos to get exFAT working?
- paule89 7y agoYou had to add it as a fuse module. I don't know if a user compiled kernel module worked. But still even if it was used as a fuse module i myself had often times problems with it. So i hope this goes away soon.
- panpanna 7y ago> To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. How about their FAT patents??
- decoyworker 7y agoWill this allow WSL2 to access your entire Windows filesystem without the performance hit? If so this is really cool.
- dodgez 7y agoMy brother-in-law heard from a friend that currently works at Microsoft that during a meeting with his boss's boss's boss or so say "We got an old school monopoly. We aren't first in many areas so we aren't targeted but we are still just raking in the cash".
- vkdelta 7y agoDoes this mean it is royalty free now?
- morekozhambu 7y agoHmm.. Oops! now exFAT will bring the [A-Za-z] case in-sensitivities into the GNU/Linux system.
- craftyguy 7y agoThe ext4 folks are working on adding case-insensitive support... https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/ https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/
- acd 7y agoThanks Microsoft and the developers there for sharing ExFat! It is great to see the changed attitude and embracing of open source software! This will ease the use of large external disks, sharing files between Windows and Linux systems. It will help with larger USB memory sticks which no longer needs to be reformatted. It will also make it much easier to deal with SD cards from cameras and mobile phones.
- cosarara 7y agoIn my experience, exFAT gets corrupted constantly, and then on linux you don't have a proper fsck for it.