exFAT Driver With Linux 6.13 Reduces FAT Chain Traversal For Better Performance

[kurkosdr]

Nice, as it looks like, we will never quite get rid of some fat filesystems.

And we shouldn't, FAT32 is pretty much universally compatible, and exFAT is the filesystem that MicroSDs with more than 32GB of capacity ship with. Also, NTFS is a supported filesystem in some TVs and set-top boxes that don't support exFAT for licensing reasons (so NTFS is the only option there if you don't want to be limited by the 4GB file size limit of FAT32).

Please no more "newer and better" filesystems for removable drives, these are more than enough. Keep your ext4 and ReiserFS in your internal drives, don't make it any worse.

[kurkosdr]

BTW the good thing about exFAT is that, unlike NTFS, it is an open standard that anyone can implement with confidence (aka not just read-only), and the last essential patent should expire by 14th April 2028.

Just like it happened with MP3, exFAT will eventually become both a widely-used standard and an open-spec royalty-free standard.

[rogerx]

BTW the good thing about exFAT is that, unlike NTFS, it is an open standard that anyone can implement with confidence (aka not just read-only), and the last essential patent should expire by 14th April 2028.

Just like it happened with MP3, exFAT will eventually become both a widely-used standard and an open-spec royalty-free standard.

And just before 2028, I'm sure MS will (supposedly) invent exFAT2, having a patent end date of 2038 and exFAT being suddenly deprecated. Of course, this is just all guess work and speculation.

[kurkosdr]

And just before 2028, I'm sure MS will (supposedly) invent exFAT2, having a patent end date of 2038 and exFAT being suddenly deprecated.

They can't do that, because exFAT is the mandatory format for MicroSD cards shipping with at least 32GB capacity and at least up to 128 TB, so Windows has to provide support for reading, writing, and formatting exFAT for as long as those are in widespread use, and this means supporting exFAT at the OS level. And it's safe to assume by 2028 we'll still be using MicroSDs with 128TB capacity or less.

See, that's the advantage of exFAT compared to NTFS, exFAT is a published standard that has been adopted as part of another standard.

Of course, this is just all guess work and speculation.

Not only is it completely unfounded guess work and speculation, but it ignores several well-known facts.

[rogerx]

They can't do that, because exFAT is the mandatory format for MicroSD cards shipping with at least 32GB capacity and at least up to 128 TB, so Windows has to provide support for reading, writing, and formatting exFAT for as long as those are in widespread use, and this means supporting exFAT at the OS level. And it's safe to assume by 2028 we'll still be using MicroSDs with 128TB capacity or less.

See, that's the advantage of exFAT compared to NTFS, exFAT is a published standard that has been adopted as part of another standard.


Not only is it completely unfounded guess work and speculation, but it ignores several well-known facts.

Yup... Just like Microsoft was never guilty of the USDOJ antitrust case...

Not only mentioning the USDOJ case, but try and completely removing/uninstalling Microsoft Edge browser nowadays from, at least, Windows 10. Just not possible. Good luck with your fight vindicating Microsoft... I'm sure they're not guilty of something!

[kurkosdr]

Yup... Just like Microsoft was never guilty of the USDOJ antitrust case...

Not only mentioning the USDOJ case, but try and completely removing/uninstalling Microsoft Edge browser nowadays from, at least, Windows 10. Just not possible. Good luck with your fight vindicating Microsoft... I'm sure they're not guilty of something!

This is a thread about exFAT, not about your general grievances with Microsoft. exFAT is the mandatory filesystem for every MicroSD shipping with at least 32GB capacity and at least up to 128 TB. It's also mandatory for external hard drives that want to be Windows-certified or whatever the program is called now (which is a good thing btw, NTFS should be avoided on external hard drives if possible, because Windows enables caching by default on NTFS, so you risk data corruption if you don't "safely remove", and you also get seamless MacOS and Desktop Linux compatibility that you don't get with NTFS).

So, there is no way Microsoft removes support within the next 3.5 years and makes all those MicroSDs and external hard drives unreadable on Windows.

[rogerx]

This is a thread about exFAT, not about your general grievances with Microsoft. exFAT is the mandatory filesystem for every MicroSD shipping with at least 32GB capacity and at least up to 128 TB. It's also mandatory for external hard drives that want to be Windows-certified or whatever the program is called now (which is a good thing btw, NTFS should be avoided on external hard drives if possible, because Windows enables caching by default on NTFS, so you risk data corruption if you don't "safely remove", and you also get seamless MacOS and Desktop Linux compatibility that you don't get with NTFS).

So, there is no way Microsoft removes support within the next 3.5 years and makes all those MicroSDs and external hard drives unreadable on Windows.

Would you like a tissue for your grievances?

I'm so glad we have you here preaching for us rather than us having to resort to reading (ExFAT) Wikipedia for factual data.

Good luck with your ventures with relying upon Microsoft as your savoir. As for myself, I'll continue expecting everything being deprecated by Microsoft.

[kurkosdr]

I'm so glad we have you here preaching for us rather than us having to resort to reading (ExFAT) Wikipedia for factual data.

Good luck with your ventures with relying upon Microsoft as your savoir.

And what you don't understand is that people care about compatibility, not how "perfect" a standard is. The two most compatible filesystems that support files larger than 4GB are NTFS and exFAT. NTFS is limited by the fact it's not a published standard (for example MacOS doesn't implement it), so it's more like a last resort for set-top boxes and TVs. Which leaves exFAT.

Much like how while you were waiting for your Ogg Vorbis darling to become mainstream, MP3 eventually became royalty-free (and it was always a published standard, so that made it equivalent to Vorbis in the openness scale). Similarly, exFAT will become royalty-free before your ext3 or ext4 darling (or whatever the darling Linux filesystem is at the moment) becomes mainstream.

As for myself, I'll continue expecting everything being deprecated by Microsoft.

Which is a position that ignores reality, because for Microsoft to deprecate exFAT, the MicroSDXC and MicroSDUC standards have to be deprecated.

[Jabberwocky]

In fairness I do not think there is any NTFS driver on any system that does not currupt the FS. Not even the windows driver manages that.
But, from my usage as far, the paragon contributed driver worked well every time. Not any worse than windows itself.

I can confirm that Windows does manage to royally mess up NTFS on Windows 10 and 11.

I have a brand new enterprise NVMe drive in a system with ECC memory. Windows HyperV crash trashed the FS twice and could not repair it. One instance I was able to reboot into Windows but most of the files were corrupt and Windows couldn't tell which were corrupt and which files were ok. Running file verification software (sfc / DISM) I managed to repair many files but there's still odd stuff like Chrome doesn't launch, can't uninstall and can't reinstall using a freshly downloaded Chrome installer.

I haven't had problems with NTFS on ntfs3 nor ntfs-3g. I haven't used ntfs3 that much because I moved away from Ubuntu / NTFS on Linux. I used ntfs-3g for a long time.

I'm slowly starting to adopt exFAT for removable media. There's some quirks but it's better than FAT32 or NTFS for my use case so far.

[rogerx]

And what you don't understand is that people care about compatibility, not how "perfect" a standard is.

Think my replies already iterated this angle.

Your replies seem to be looking for an argument where there is none.