The Staging exFAT Driver Set To Be Nuked In Linux 5.7, Thanks To Samsung's New Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Staging exFAT Driver Set To Be Nuked In Linux 5.7, Thanks To Samsung's New Driver

With the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring there is going to be a new exFAT file-system drive developed by Samsung as outlined last week. While that is being added to the formal file-system area of the kernel rather than staging so both could co-exist for a transition period, already with Linux 5.7 will be the removal of the existing staging driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Staging-exFAT-Nuking-5.7

[CommunityMember]

Not surprising, and certainly expected with the Samsung contribution (the timing for cut-over might have been different, but the end result would seem to never have been in doubt). Having long term commercial vendor support is almost certainly going to be better than depending on the work of the individual contributors, talented though they may be, many/most of whom simply never had access to the various information that Samsung has.

In the end, the good news for many is a well supported exFAT filesystem driver is going to be available in the mainline kernel. Everything else is fluff for most of the users.

[c117152]

Hopefully it will work its way back to Android through the backporting. The kids loading all those game textures and running tons of telemetry are the perfect beta testers

[xorbe]

Hopefully it will work its way back to Android through the backporting. The kids loading all those game textures and running tons of telemetry are the perfect beta testers

Isn't that literally the source of this driver? What is reading/writing exFAT on Samsung phones ...

[jabl]

What about the userspace tools, such as mkfs? Are they the same for both codebases, or does it need to be in sync with the kernel version?

[CommunityMember]

Isn't that literally the source of this driver? What is reading/writing exFAT on Samsung phones ...

AFAIK not all Android licencees also licensed the Microsoft patents, so exFAT support is likely not universal. As for backporting the drivers to other phones (some of which still run kernels that would be considered very old by many), that will be up to the manufacturer, but history suggests that only the major manufacturers will even consider doing that work, and only for their later gen phones.

[mzs.112000]

AFAIK not all Android licencees also licensed the Microsoft patents, so exFAT support is likely not universal. As for backporting the drivers to other phones (some of which still run kernels that would be considered very old by many), that will be up to the manufacturer, but history suggests that only the major manufacturers will even consider doing that work, and only for their later gen phones.

IIRC, the LG G2, even on custom ROMs, is using a kernel from way back in the early 3.x days...

[skeevy420]

IIRC, the LG G2, even on custom ROMs, is using a kernel from way back in the early 3.x days...

My LG V20 has a very new 3.18.71 kernel

[Space Heater]

Having long term commercial vendor support is almost certainly going to be better

Yes, and it's also a big win that mainline and a fair bit of the android ecosystem are now using a common driver. I think this will make people more confident in using it on Linux, given that the filesystem has been tested for years.

[starshipeleven]

What about the userspace tools, such as mkfs? Are they the same for both codebases, or does it need to be in sync with the kernel version?

afaik the mkfs and the fck is the same also used with the FUSE exfat. it's not like exFAT has ever got any new feature since release anyway. Being in sync is needed for actively developed filesystems like btrfs (and ZFS for that matter).