Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver

[Melcar]

Personally I have started to format all my external drives and large USB keys as ExFAT. I used to have NTFS on my external HDD/SSDs since I often work with Linux and Windows boxes and it worked "alright" except for the occasional data corruption. I have since formatted the drives with ExFAT and I have been experiencing slightly increased read/writes and so far no data corruption. The only but I have (and it's minor) is the lack of long partition label support.

[xorbe]

Creates 1000 directories in 56 seconds ... I suspect there's still a lot of performance left on the table there. That's only 18 directories/second.

[jacob]

Well, (V)FAT and NTFS also have open source implementations. Though as other people have pointed out both of those have severe drawbacks.
But what happened to the MS patents on exFAT?

VFAT has size limitations and NTFS isn't really supported anywhere besides Windows and Linux (and only as a second class citizen for the latter). I think that MS expressly granted a patent licence on ExFAT for open source implementations.

[catpig]

It is open source [snip].

Well, (V)FAT and NTFS also have open source implementations. Though as other people have pointed out both of those have severe drawbacks.
But what happened to the MS patents on exFAT?

[andreduartesp]

I never used that filesystem to be honest. What are its advantages? It's open source? It comes from Microsoft, right?

Basically any device with SD card support for the last years uses only exFat (including Android phones, GOPRO cameras, ...) so its very difficult to not use is entirely...

[rickst29]

pretty sure only required on 64GB+ sd/microsd cards

Certainly REQUIRED there, but also extremely useful whenever a single file (such as a video) will exceed 4GB size on a smaller drive (USB or SD). I often hand out music videos on 32GB micro cards with SD adapters. I always format them as EXFAT and master the videos as "MP4", in order to provide a "lowest common denominator" format for distributing home movies to users with various kinds of computers (Apple, Windoze, Linux, and "other").

The same applies when I format USB 3.0 flash drives for the same purpose, allowing others to "play" a big video file on their computers. If only televisions directly supported mp4 and USB 3.0 on their USB inputs, people wouldn't even need a computer for those files. But TVs generally support only USB 2.0 (too slow), and a few types of photo-images, primarily JPG.

[sinepgib]

It'd be bitchin if we got the PSN in addition to Steam, Epic, Origin, Uplay, Xbox Live, and whatnot. The goshdarn PS4 and PS5 might as well run the FreeBSD equivalent of SteamOS 3; both using the same consumer PC CPU and GPU manufacturer for their hardware. Due to the numerous executable VM methods and compatibility layers, there's no technical reason Sony couldn't figure out one of those for the executables, whip up PSVK to convert their graphics over to Vulkan, and then release a PC and Linux store with the Sony equivalent of Proton to power the games.

Microsoft was smart when making a Windows 10 version a requirement with Xbox Live...who also happens to use the same consumer PC CPU and GPU hardware as Valve and Sony.

But what's in it for them? Microsoft wins from giving an extra incentive to use Windows (even if most people don't explicitly pay for the license, Steam may take gamers from their platform and they do get revenue from data collection), Stream never sold consoles so it doesn't lose a thing. Sony sells a complete platform that includes the console. I'm not sure it would be a good idea for them, commercially, to make their games playable in PC.
Besides, fixed hardware is useful for developers, which is an incentive to target the platform. Once you lose that, why would they prefer to make PS exclusive games when they could reach a wider audience with Steam?

[Palu Macil]

Very nice, but if its going to be used on 5.19 it will not affect a lot of mobiles. Most likely they have to backport it down to...3.x? or 4.19? dont know which one is currently used for Android phones. But usually its quite old old long long stable.

Not that old. A new device launching with Android 12 can use 4.19, 5.4 or 5.10 and Android 13 will be 5.4, 5.10, or 5.15, so that includes the most recent LTS kernel--the same one used in Ubuntu 22.04.

[skeevy420]

I'm surprised Sony hasn't yet released a Store app like MS Live Games Service whatever it is for Windows AND Linux. Keeping everything on their exclusive and hard to get PS(5) consoles is going to really hurt them in the long run.

It'd be bitchin if we got the PSN in addition to Steam, Epic, Origin, Uplay, Xbox Live, and whatnot. The goshdarn PS4 and PS5 might as well run the FreeBSD equivalent of SteamOS 3; both using the same consumer PC CPU and GPU manufacturer for their hardware. Due to the numerous executable VM methods and compatibility layers, there's no technical reason Sony couldn't figure out one of those for the executables, whip up PSVK to convert their graphics over to Vulkan, and then release a PC and Linux store with the Sony equivalent of Proton to power the games.

Microsoft was smart when making a Windows 10 version a requirement with Xbox Live...who also happens to use the same consumer PC CPU and GPU hardware as Valve and Sony.

[kylew77]

It is open source and has one HUGE advantage: like (V)FAT it offers perfect interoperability by being supported by everything and everyone. But unlike (V)FAT, it's 64 bit so it doesn't suffer from the same volume size limitations. I think (but don't take my word for it) that it also got rid of that horrible hack in VFAT that allowed long file names on top of the old 8+3 format. Instead it supports long file names natively.

None of the *BSDs as of yet support ExFat natively, FreeBSD is working on a port and since presumably ExFat works on the PS5 Sony could contribute back and submit a patch for FreeBSD 12.x and 13.x!