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But ExFAT lacks the FAT's virtues of being universally supported and royalty-free, yet still is a very dumb FS with no journal (which means unreliable) and no e

But ExFAT lacks the FAT's virtues of being universally supported and royalty-free, yet still is a very dumb FS with no journal (which means unreliable) and no extended attributes (which means data-metadata separation impossible) so I don't see a reason for it to exist anywhere outside severely resource-limited embedded applications. I would rather use Ext4 everywhere for everything. Is the problem preventing wide adoption of Ext4 GPL?

Macha 5y ago
NTFS hasn't been widely adopted by firmware manufacturers either. I don't think firmware manufacturers want to spend time implementing support for even the NTFS/ext/APFS era of filesystems, never mind anything newer like ZFS or btrfs.
- vetinari 5y ago
  NTFS was also undocumented, and whatever the ntfs-3g folks or others working on alternate implementation figured out, it was via reverse engineering.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Sure, but the manufacturers presumably play for licenses for the AMD AGESA, etc. so could pay for a NTFS license if they wanted to. And ext has plenty of documentation and they haven't implemented that either. So I think keeping down the software complexity is the more likely method. Down to 1. The limited software investment these companies make (often just buying and reskinning firmware from AMI) 2. The limited space available on the ROMs due to hardware cost savings (e.g. companies have had to drop GUIs or support for less popular APUs to add support for new generations of mainstream CPU in firmware updates)
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > NTFS hasn't been widely adopted by firmware manufacturers either. Although very complex and very undocumented, NTFS has actually been adopted very widely and quite reliably. Most of the pre-smart TVs and set-top-boxes can read FAT and NTFS USB drives which makes NTFS the only choice if you want movies exceeding 4 GiBs.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    In fact NTFS is available on most commercial UEFI implementations. You can use NTFS to format your Windows install pendrive...
speeder 5y ago
Seemly ExFAT is specially unreliable... Nintendo Switch community first advice when you buy one is: If you buy a SD Card with ExFAT, reformat it to FAT, because ExFAT will eventually cause your files to be corrupted...
- babypuncher 5y ago
  That may have more to do with Nintendo's implementation. The exFAT support that was added to the Linux kernel a few years ago has been fine.
- oynqr 5y ago
  The Switch has a bad exfat driver.
Beltalowda 5y ago
A EFI partition is mostly read-only, so I don't think that's a particularly large problem? > I would rather use Ext4 everywhere for everything. Is the problem preventing wide adoption of Ext4 GPL? The BSDs don't support ext{2,3,4} particularly well, and Linux doesn't support FFS/UFS particularly well. I mean, there's support for these things, but it's far from complete or perfect and it's taken a long time. It's just a fair amount of effort to implement filesystems well, and there's very little tolerance for errors. Ext4 isn't spectacularly complicated, but it's not exactly a simple FS either. I think that has more to do with lack of support than anything else: lots of effort for not all that much practical benefit.

Macha 5y ago

NTFS hasn't been widely adopted by firmware manufacturers either. I don't think firmware manufacturers want to spend time implementing support for even the NTFS/ext/APFS era of filesystems, never mind anything newer like ZFS or btrfs.

vetinari 5y ago
NTFS was also undocumented, and whatever the ntfs-3g folks or others working on alternate implementation figured out, it was via reverse engineering.
- Macha 5y ago
  Sure, but the manufacturers presumably play for licenses for the AMD AGESA, etc. so could pay for a NTFS license if they wanted to. And ext has plenty of documentation and they haven't implemented that either. So I think keeping down the software complexity is the more likely method. Down to 1. The limited software investment these companies make (often just buying and reskinning firmware from AMI) 2. The limited space available on the ROMs due to hardware cost savings (e.g. companies have had to drop GUIs or support for less popular APUs to add support for new generations of mainstream CPU in firmware updates)
qwerty456127 5y ago
> NTFS hasn't been widely adopted by firmware manufacturers either. Although very complex and very undocumented, NTFS has actually been adopted very widely and quite reliably. Most of the pre-smart TVs and set-top-boxes can read FAT and NTFS USB drives which makes NTFS the only choice if you want movies exceeding 4 GiBs.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  In fact NTFS is available on most commercial UEFI implementations. You can use NTFS to format your Windows install pendrive...

speeder 5y ago

Seemly ExFAT is specially unreliable... Nintendo Switch community first advice when you buy one is: If you buy a SD Card with ExFAT, reformat it to FAT, because ExFAT will eventually cause your files to be corrupted...

babypuncher 5y ago
That may have more to do with Nintendo's implementation. The exFAT support that was added to the Linux kernel a few years ago has been fine.
oynqr 5y ago
The Switch has a bad exfat driver.

Beltalowda 5y ago

A EFI partition is mostly read-only, so I don't think that's a particularly large problem? > I would rather use Ext4 everywhere for everything. Is the problem preventing wide adoption of Ext4 GPL? The BSDs don't support ext{2,3,4} particularly well, and Linux doesn't support FFS/UFS particularly well. I mean, there's support for these things, but it's far from complete or perfect and it's taken a long time. It's just a fair amount of effort to implement filesystems well, and there's very little tolerance for errors. Ext4 isn't spectacularly complicated, but it's not exactly a simple FS either. I think that has more to do with lack of support than anything else: lots of effort for not all that much practical benefit.