Re: [PATCH] staging: exfat: add exfat filesystem code to staging

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2019-10-16T16:50:10Z

On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 06:32:31PM +0200, Pali Rohár wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 October 2019 09:22:11 Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 06:03:49PM +0200, Pali Rohár wrote:
> > > > Can I assume you will be implementing TexFAT support once the spec is
> > > > available?
> > >
> > > I cannot promise that I would implement something which I do not know
> > > how is working... It depends on how complicated TexFAT is and also how
> > > future exfat support in kernel would look like.
> > >
> > > But I'm interesting in implementing it.
> >
> > What devices need TexFAT? I thought it the old devices that used it are
> > long obsolete and gone. How is this feature going to be tested/used?
>
> Hi Greg! Per 3.1.16 of exFAT specification [1], TexFAT extension is the
> only way how to use more FAT tables, like in FAT32 (where you normally
> have two FATs). Secondary FAT table can be used e.g. for redundancy or
> data recovery. For FAT32 volumes, e.g. fsck.fat uses secondary FAT table
> when first one is corrupted.
>
> Usage of just one FAT table in exFAT is just step backward from FAT32 as
> secondary FAT table is sometimes the only way how to recover broken FAT
> fs. So I do not think that exFAT is for old devices, but rather
> non-exFAT is for old devices. Modern filesystems have journal or other
> technique to do (fast|some) recovery, exFAT has nothing.
>
> And how is this feature going to be used? That depends on specification.
>
> [1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification#3116-numberoffats-field

Ok, but given that the "only" os that can read/write the TexFAT
extension is WinCE, and that os is obsolete these days, it might be hard
to find images to test/validate against :)

But hey, I'll take the patch if you write it, no objection!

thanks,

greg k-h