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Sony Beefs up FAT for Consumer Devices

An anonymous reader points to a report at LinuxDevices which says that "Sony has created an enhanced version of the vFAT filesystem that it says works better in Linux-based consumer electronic devices with removable USB mass storage devices. Unlike vFAT, the xvFAT filesystem will not induce a kernel panic if a USB storage device is removed during a write operation, Sony says," and writes "For now, xvFAT is a patch to the Linux 2.4.20 source tree maintained by CELF, an industry group of consumer electronics giants working to improve Linux for CE devices. Sony intends to submit the filesystem for inclusion in the mainstream 2.6 Linux tree as well."

2 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Crash??? by KiloByte · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a mount option -- in the case of data corruption, it's usually safer to go down instantly rather than continue. However, I don't expect anyone but the worst lunatics to set it on a FAT filesystem, especially one on an USB device.

    Having the kernel crash (as opposed to a panic) due to a bug in a filesystem driver is another story. I've once discovered that a maliciously malformed filesystem can send everything into the la-la land. This is where Hurd's separation of kernel structures would be useful.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  2. I have to admit, I'm skeptical by croddy · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm skeptical that yanking a vfat-formatted usb-storage device out of the port while I'm in the middle of a write operation is going to cause a kernel panic.

    I'm gonna give it a shot.

    Right now I'm going to start copying a large file to my thumb drive, and once it's got 30-40mb done, I'm going to pull out.

    Wait for it!

    Good news, everyone! All I got was an error message from GNOME -- "I/O Error while copying file foo.avi. Would you like to continue? Skip/Cancel/Retry"

    I'm gonna stick the drive back in and tell it to continue -- stay tuned!

    Holy crap, it picked up all on its own.

    Wait...

    Yep, it just passed an fsck.

    Sony, what are you smoking???