Samsung's Better exFAT Driver Gets Revised Ahead Of Mainline Linux Integration

[Britoid]

Fuck exFAT. F2FS os the future!

I don't think you understand what filesystems like FAT and exFAT are for.

[starshipeleven]

Why so much fuss with a zillion exFAT implementations?

People apparently wants to use USB and sdcard flash bigger than 4GB without retarded "can't make files bigger than 4GB" limitations from ancient filesystems like FAT32

What's the best? What are the differences between them?

Can't you read the article? This is a more recent version of the same thing. Samsung screwed up in the past and had to "opensource" their ExFat driver they use for Android devices, then kept developing on it behind closed doors.

Now that MS said it's OK they are mainlining their current ExFat driver and the older code that was opensourced back then will probably be dropped from staging.

I'm still waiting for a proper in-kernel NTFS implementation.

There is very little incentive for that, probably because NTFS sucks donkey balls.

[Ardje]

That is how the proprietary world works - unless they can licence an implementation, they would all have their own competing internal implementatoins. Samsung were not going to give their internal proprietary code to their competitors

No. Exfat was/is patented by microsoft (with which they probable have patent deals), so they could not disclose it.
Samsung has always been about upstreaming and introducing new frameworks. v4l2 m2m comes to mind. They are very active (either by developers or by funding) in wayland land (tizen), gstreamer, enlightenment and more. Basically they are one of the few that create new infra structure in the kernel and add new drivers. I use f2fs for my steam partition for instance, enlightenment on my odroid xu4 desktop and more.
They also had(have?) been a long time maintainer for MMU less linux which was used in the Sony handy cams.
For instance the AMLOGIC usb driver for the s805 was a copy of samsungs opensource driver. The difference was: samsung was already years ahead, and amlogic (odroid c1 for instance) have had very very crappy usb support. Samsung's driver got consolidated into the dwc driver, and amlogic is now going to get consolidated into the dwc driver too.
What is noteworthy though is that the same company that went after everybody to collect on "inventions" that Linus Torvalds made before they patented it, is now seemingly changing their attitude...
This is really weird, a company that was full of hate towards Linux doing a 180. In Germany they are still spreading FUD while the main company is embracing it without a chance for extinguishing it.

[CommunityMember]

Samsungs exFAT driver has been open source for years, it's just in a much better state than all the other ones.

A version of the exFAT driver was made available years ago. However, (a) that version of the driver was derived from an accidental leaked source code push from Samsung (pushed to the wrong repo?), (b), the author of that derived driver acknowledged illegally changing the license to GPLv2, and (c) Microsoft still had patents which had not yet been released to the Open Invention Network (OIN) which made it illegal for use in countries that respect such IP without a license.

Once Microsoft agreed to release the patents to OIN, Samsung was willing (likely happy) to take their work and re-license it and offer the current version to the mainline kernel. Everyone wins (Samsung, who no longer has to maintain an out of tree driver, Microsoft, who gets good press for offering the IP to free software users, and the users of the Linux kernel, who get access to a very common file system used in a number of devices and systems).

[duby229]

A version of the exFAT driver was made available years ago. However, (a) that version of the driver was derived from an accidental leaked source code push from Samsung (pushed to the wrong repo?), (b), the author of that derived driver acknowledged illegally changing the license to GPLv2, and (c) Microsoft still had patents which had not yet been released to the Open Invention Network (OIN) which made it illegal for use in countries that respect such IP without a license.

Once Microsoft agreed to release the patents to OIN, Samsung was willing (likely happy) to take their work and re-license it and offer the current version to the mainline kernel. Everyone wins (Samsung, who no longer has to maintain an out of tree driver, Microsoft, who gets good press for offering the IP to free software users, and the users of the Linux kernel, who get access to a very common file system used in a number of devices and systems).

next MS develops an incompatible (backwards, but not forwards compatible) exfat filesystem, then they write partner agreements that require them to use it exclusively...

wanna make a bet? a few years tops...

eee at its finest.

[Guest]

I don't think you understand what filesystems like FAT and exFAT are for.

Unfortunately standards-compliant SDXC cards use exFAT by default. Normally, I use something like EXT4 or F2FS, because I don't really need compatibility with other operating systems, and I tend to use NTFS otherwise, but having proper drivers in kernel rather than FUSE might make me switch over in cases where I need compatibility.

[CKing123]

next MS develops an incompatible (backwards, but not forwards compatible) exfat filesystem, then they write partner agreements that require them to use it exclusively...

wanna make a bet? a few years tops...

eee at its finest.

Just wait until you are proven wrong.

[starshipeleven]

next MS develops an incompatible (backwards, but not forwards compatible) exfat filesystem, then they write partner agreements that require them to use it exclusively...

wanna make a bet? a few years tops...

And what kind of magic will they use to convince everyone to use a new filesystem that isn't particularly better than exfat?

The whole point of the existence of exfat is removing the silly 4GB file size limitation, it is otherwise identical to FAT32.

There isn't much they can add to that, it's already "perfect".

[You-]

No. Exfat was/is patented by microsoft (with which they probable have patent deals), so they could not disclose it.

I am not blaming samsung for the situation. They had to act within the patent shithole that was created after exfat was made the mandatory format for High Capacity SD cards and licensing restrictions imposed by Microsoft.

The code could not be upstreamed due to those reasons and because there was not a unified upstream solution, everyone had to either write their own, or licence an existing implementation (which may contain proprietary code from other parties). Its a possible explanation for the multiple implementations of the driver.

[xorbe]

My dual boot machine has an exFAT partition to easily share files between Win10 and Tumbleweed. Man, so nice to be rid of FAT32's 4GB limitation.