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

[phoronix]

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

While there has been the initial Microsoft exFAT file-system driver since Linux 5.4, that code is based on a vintage snapshot of prior Samsung code. Samsung engineers meanwhile have been working to upstream a much newer and better off exFAT implementation to replace that existing driver and it looks like it could be ready for Linux 5.6...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-Better-exFAT-v11

[StandaSK]

It's awesome to see that Samsung will continue working on this upstream

GJ Samsung

[timofonic]

Why so much fuss with a zillion exFAT implementations? What's the best? What are the differences between them?

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

[You-]

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

[xeekei]

exFAT is what I use for USB sticks, since it's the closest thing to a universal FS that isn't FAT32 that I know of.

Good to hear that I won't need the FUSE version anymore. (Though apparently I haven't needed it since 5.6)

[polarathene]

I wonder if this will mean an exFAT USB stick that doesn't want to mount on my linux systems(causes large CPU usage until timeout/cancel of mount), will actually be mountable. That said, I'm pretty sure it's one I tried on Windows and it claimed it could not repair it(it'd still mount if skipping the repair attempt, providing a brief window to view/copy files before becoming unresponsive).

[Britoid]

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

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

[numacross]

exFAT is what I use for USB sticks, since it's the closest thing to a universal FS that isn't FAT32 that I know of.

You might want to take a look at UDF since it can be used for this purpose.

[DrYak]

You might want to take a look at UDF since it can be used for this purpose

Was going to tout the same. And unlike exFAT, UDF is log structured (just like F2FS), so it's much gentler on the flash than FAT-based systems.

Note that in order to use the same stick on Windows and Mac OS X, a formatting trick needs to be used

(The UDF partition need to start from physical sector 0, and the MBR partition must be fit within the boot area of the UDF filesystem partition and point back to sector zero.
That's because Mac OS X absolutely insist on UDF starting from sector 0, like a plain DVD - i.e. a raw partition (like a floppy). And Windows absolutely insist on having a partition table (like a harddisk / SDD / Zip drive). Linux doesn't give a damn. Luckily, UDF has a very large area at the beginning (e.g.: so you can fit large boot code), so you can still embed a partition table that points back to itself so you keep both Mac OSX and Windows happy)

[Mario Junior]

Fuck exFAT. F2FS os the future!