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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."
Is FAT used for anything other than USB drives?
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
As a long-time user of Linux who is currently using Microsoft Windows XP, the whole vfat (FAT with Win95 long file names) patent and how Microsoft has handled this patent makes me feel that maybe Microsoft is engaging in the same kind of monopolistic behavior that they engaged in when they destroyed Netscape in the 1990s.
I'm sure people know about Microsoft's patent violation lawsuit against TomTom; if you don't the Wikipedia is your friend. What a lot of people don't know is that Microsoft made some changes to Vista so that you can no longer easily use an unpatented filesystem like ext2 (Linux's 1990s file system which nicely enough is supported in Windows with a couple of different 3rd party drivers).
For me, it seems very suspicious that Microsoft made some changes to Vista that make it very difficult to use filesystems not patented by Microsoft around the same time they used licenses for their filesystems as a revenue source.
I posted a blog about this back in March and to quote that blog entry:
Is FAT used for anything other than USB drives?
You say that like that's a small thing.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
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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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The reason that FAT is still around has more to do with compatibility than any kind of technical merit. Pretty much every version of Windows supports FAT, and most other operating systems can use it as well. I think most "smart" vendors have figured out that if they use FAT for their devices (music players, cameras, GPS units) then pretty much anyone will be able to use them. That's why it's important to have FAT support in Linux, no one is saying that you have to use it on your / partition though. :-)
What am I missing here ?
Will Groklaw one day be reporting about MSFT v. SPI ?
Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
Hopefully, soon, we can start using UDF instead of FAT. Cross-OS compatibility is pretty much there, though FAT's support is still the most broad.
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).
Let me guess.. you are in your teens/early 20's..
You do realize that in the real world people play the prisoner's dilemma, right?
"His name was James Damore."
Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
Then why would you want them to be FAT?
Hmm, I'm not so sure this is a good idea.....
How do simpler devices that write to FAT deal with it?
cameras, pdas, etc
All modern PDAs can typically deal with long filenames fully, so no problems there. They would read the long filenames properly from a FAT disk created with this Linux patch.
Digital cameras typically use short filenames exclusively (e.g. IMPC1234.JPG). They mostly only write files and don't read files other than those that they've created themselves. This patch doesn't affect filename reading, only filename writing, so cameras would work okay too.
MP3 players typically deal with long filenames as well, so no problems again, hopefully... as long as they obey the specs for reading FAT partitions.
So this patch should not interfere much with interoperability with modern accessory/embedded devices. Of course, the patch does remove some functionality... namely the ability to create nicely matched short filenames when you're also creating a long filename. But I do believe it's a fairly clever way to avoid this bullshit patent while maintaining interoperability.
It's important to understand that this patch DOES NOT permanently remove any functionality from the Linux kernel. It merely provides a kernel config option to disable full FAT operation. Depending on your jurisdiction/comfort level/Microsoft-hatred/etc. you can choose to enable/disable the patch.
My bicyles