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Linux Patch Clears the Air For Use of Microsoft's FAT Filesystem
Ars Technica is reporting that a new kernel patch may provide a workaround to allow use of Microsoft's FAT file system on Linux without paying licensing fees. "Andrew Tridgell, one of the lead developers behind the Samba project, published a patch last week that will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation so that it will not generate both short and long filenames. In situations where the total filename fits within the 11-character limit, the filesystem will generate only a short name. When the filename exceeds that length, it will only generate a long name and will populate the short name value with 11 invalid characters so that it is ignored by the operating system."
When I read this my first impression, though admittedly not an informed one, was "you mean people pay to use FAT?" I wish patents were more like trademarks, where if you don't vigorously defend them and instead let them go for a while, you lose them and they become public domain. Wouldn't that be nice, to get rid of all these situations as well as all of the "submarine patents" in one fell swoop?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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Media players. Hard drives, in computers where there are multiple OS's. Industrial equipment controllers. I bet you even some satellites use FAT.
It's ubiquitous because it's simple and until the NTFS drivers were fixed(read:not trashing your data), FAT was one of the only convenient formats for sharing data between Windows and Linux.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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Actually, if you follow the links, it sounds like deliberate behaviour by Microsoft. If true Microsoft are asking for trouble with this. They change the behaviour for their own file system types, and generate an error for any other:
Quoting from the fsdriver.org site:
"Currently it is not possible to start a program on Vista if UAC is enabled and the program's executable is stored on an Ex2/Ext3 volume. An "invalid parameter" message box appears, but the program does not start.
UAC is the feature of Vista that prompts the user to elevate the user privileges to administrator level when necessary. UAC is enabled by default. It is not recommended to disable it.
The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista."
source: http://www.fs-driver.org/relnotes.html
ext2fsd and fs-driver both work on vista. and they'll both mount my ext3 filesystems, as long as i formatted them with the right inode size.
the issue you (eventually) link to basically says that all ext2/3 filesystems mounted on vista are the equivalent of noexec. i don't think it is accurate to describe that as a significant issue. i don't know many people who keep substantial quantities of windows executables on their linux drives. the permissions system on ext2/3 is totally wrong for windows anyway, so you'd never use it for, say, %ProgramFiles% or %SystemRoot%.
do not disable UAC.
the problem i have with vista's driver support is that on amd64 it requires them to be cryptographically signed by some sort of extortion outfit, or i have to press F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 F8 up up enter every time i boot the system in order to get it to load the drivers i need.
I use FAT on my usb keys only because I want to be able to use them from Windows machines.
But in Windows Vista+ you can also format USB flash drives to UDF (you’ll have to use the command line FORMAT tool, the GUI frontend won’t show UDF as an option).
When formatted in UDF, the drive’s performance improves dramatically: on my usb key, untarring the linux kernel and then deleting it changed from taking a few hours to taking a few minutes.
UDF can be read/written under Linux and, unlike NTFS, it natively supports all UNIX features (including extended attributes), so for example you could boot Linux straight from a Windows-accessible USB drive without creating ext3 images on it, and without using userspace file system drivers.
So it could be a nice solution for Linux/Windows interoperability... but sadly Windows stops liking UDF file systems if Linux creates files on them (I don’t know what exactly makes Windows upset; when it happens, Windows’ CHKDSK says the file system is OK).