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Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing
alphadogg writes "Microsoft Thursday announced a broadening of its licensing program around its exFAT file system, which is designed to handle large multimedia files. Microsoft hopes companies making devices such as cameras and smartphones will adopt the Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology to support the sharing of audio and video files. The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE."
Microsoft realeased an updated SDHCI driver for windows XP which is supposed to support SDHC cards. But since it has not been distributed with Windows Update, I suppose it could have some problem. I've never tested it.
Are you serious? I wonder, have you ever heard of:
* The AARD code?
* OOXML?
* The Halloween documents?
* Embrace, extend and extinguish?
* Samizdat?
"Have some faith", you say? Indeed, to trust Microsoft to act ethically is a matter of faith: to believe in something incredible against all evidence.
Circumcision is child abuse.
What exactly is evil? Firstly, they haven't created a standard. If they had then surely they would have published the specifications somewhere. exFAT is a proprietry file format.
I don't know if they expect everyone to use it, although they may hope that everyone uses it.
Everything that wants to SDXC will have to use exFAT. It's part of that standard. This is going to be inconvenient for anyone who wants to use their shiny new camera/camcorder on a Mac or linux netbook or someone else's XP machine.
It's still a FAT variant, which means that seeking in a file is an O(n) operation (it's O(log(n)) on most systems) in terms of the size of the file. They've added a free space bitmap, but creating and appending to a file is still O(n) in terms of the size of the disk, just with a smaller constant. Both the FAT and the free space bitmap need to be kept in RAM for reasonable performance. The FAT size depends on the disk size and the configuration, but a typical 32GB memory card will need 32MB for the FAT. This is a lot of memory for a mobile device. Something like the N900 has 32GB of Flash and only 256MB of RAM. You're using an eighth of the RAM just for the FAT. More if you add another memory card, and that's not counting the free space bitmap (also needs to be in RAM, but is quite a bit smaller), ACL or file caches or any other driver overhead.
Oh, and the FAT itself needs to have individual words updated in a large contiguous section, which is about the slowest operation possible for Flash. They could improve this by using -1 instead of 0 to indicate free sectors: then allocating a sector would not require erasing a flash sector, but deallocating would.
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Also, does it support Unicode?
Anything that supports the full 8-bit range of code units supports Unicode in the UTF-8 encoding.
Yes, exFAT is part of the new SD specifications. So is FAT32.
What's really interesting about the exFAT specification is the terms of the license it's under (at least through the SD Association)
If you need access to the standard so you can build a device (or program) that will only need to understand the contents of the filesystem when it's accessed in a read-only manner, you don't actually have to pay a licensing fee. So, an MP3/4 player won't need a paid license for exFAT. It's only if the device needs to *WRITE* to the filesystem (such as a camera) that a paid license is required.
SD, the camera manufacturers are free to make cameras that support other formats.
But they won't, because Microsoft will use its privileged position as the sole controller of "security" updates for its desktop monopoly OS to automatically push this encumbered filesystem to the vast majority of computers in use. No camera or card maker could ever hope to surmount that barrier and install enough filesystem drivers to reach critical mass of general adoption.
Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly position OSes to generate royalties in the unrelated camera market. That looks like an antitrust violation to me.
Speaking of the intentional FAT32 limitations...
Try formatting a drive bigger than 32GB with fat32 on win2k, win98, linux or macos, it works fine..
With XP they crippled that functionality for no other reason than to force people to use the more proprietary ntfs.
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You don't have to understand the filesystem to be able to write data to it, as long as something else is telling you where to put the bytes.
So, for example, an SD-Card reader doesn't have to have a paid license because the card reader doesn't have to understand the filesystem. All it has to know about is reading and writing blocks. The OS has to know how exFAT works if that's the filesystem on the media.