51–60 of 109 posts
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But I just want 5GB files
Microsoft just wants a check from you. We are all forced to pay for this ancient software every time we buy a device that uses it. Wouldn't this money be better used elsewhere? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Patent...
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Camera manufacturers and SD card manufacturers can't start shipping SD cards formatted with btrfs until Windows supports it out of the box. They can start shipping SD cards formatted with FAT32 and software/firmware which reads and writes FAT32+BigFAT.
If they can ship software that reads BigFAT, why can’t they ship software that reads btrfs?
2. Switching to BTRFS would be a breaking change. BigFAT wouldn't be. You can still use the card in devices that do not support it, without needing to reformat. Those devices would just lose access to some files.
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There are so many good filesystems out there. Is it really necessary to keep dragging FAT along? ReactOS is using btrfs, which has so many useful options that FAT will never see (zstd, xxhash, flash-aware options, snapshots, send/receive, etc.). This is positioned both for Linux and Windows. Microsoft itself restrains ReFS to enterprise use, and btrfs offers so much more functionality. We should stop using a file sys…
> Is it really necessary to keep dragging FAT along? Anything involving embedded and without deep pockets has no other option, FAT (sadly) still is the least common denominator. Some speak ExFAT, but not sure how good the tooling support is outside of Microsoft, and there are still patent concerns.
e.g. some widget without network connection that optionally logs an audit trail to an attached USB media, could still end up with only a couple hundred kilobytes of soldered-on ROM to store the whole firmware, while wanting to write more than 4GB of audit logs.
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Camera manufacturers and SD card manufacturers can't start shipping SD cards formatted with btrfs until Windows supports it out of the box. They can start shipping SD cards formatted with FAT32 and software/firmware which reads and writes FAT32+BigFAT.
If they can ship software that reads BigFAT, why can’t they ship software that reads btrfs?
Do you know what happens when you insert a btrfs-formatted SD card or USB stick into a Windows or macOS machine? It tells you that the drive is unreadable and asks if you want to initialize it. If the user answers yes to that question, the system formats the drive and all of their data is lost.
With a BigFAT-formatted drive, the system will mount it no problem, the user will be able to browse the contents, and the only weird part is that their largest files are split into parts.
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There are so many good filesystems out there. Is it really necessary to keep dragging FAT along? ReactOS is using btrfs, which has so many useful options that FAT will never see (zstd, xxhash, flash-aware options, snapshots, send/receive, etc.). This is positioned both for Linux and Windows. Microsoft itself restrains ReFS to enterprise use, and btrfs offers so much more functionality. We should stop using a file sys…
> Is it really necessary to keep dragging FAT along? Anything involving embedded and without deep pockets has no other option, FAT (sadly) still is the least common denominator. Some speak ExFAT, but not sure how good the tooling support is outside of Microsoft, and there are still patent concerns.
Are the exFAT patents still a problem nowadays? > exFAT was a proprietary file system until 2019, when Microsoft released the specification and allowed OIN members to use their patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT#Legal_status
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And on a camera that costs anywhere from USD$1000 to USD$6500 does the cost of an exFAT license really matter?
Yes, it does. If you manufacture 100K of them, and save 10 dollars on every piece, you got an extra million in savings.
The question I have is, why Segger? When I saw this I was like "the debugger company?!?!" Clearly this wouldn't fall under their business, so it makes sense for them to open it up, but why did they do it in the first place?
My suspicion is that customers are bugging them to support large files in emFile and they don't want to pay the license fee for exFAT. I think they even can't do that with their current licensing model, which is one-time per product (not item) or product-family payment.
EDIT: I tried to find out if Microsoft's exFAT is licensed per product or per unit and I found that it used to be a 300000 USD flat fee in 2009 but seems to be free since 2019. So my theory from above has no basis and I wonder why Segger does not simply implement exFAT?
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Camera manufacturers and SD card manufacturers can't start shipping SD cards formatted with btrfs until Windows supports it out of the box. They can start shipping SD cards formatted with FAT32 and software/firmware which reads and writes FAT32+BigFAT.
If they can ship software that reads BigFAT, why can’t they ship software that reads btrfs?
> Why not exFAT... Microsoft owns several patents, and anyone who implements or uses exFAT technology needs Microsoft's permission, which typically also includes paying fees to Microsoft. While BigFAT not being encumbered by any patents is a good thing, the camera industry have pretty much standardized on exFAT for their removable file storage format. Something I'm curious about is how a 5GB video file (quite common…
ExFAT is not limited to a 4GB maximum file size. It just has more than 4GB in the file. I guess 4GB seemed like a reasonable limit when FAT32 was designed. Most likely FAT32 has a 32bit number for file size and ExFAT presumably has either a 64bit one or stores file size in some format other than bytes.
FAT32 was always seen as stop-gap measure for low-end consumer hardware when introduced in 1996; NTFS was introduced 3 years prior to handle terabyte-scale data for enterprise users.
> Most likely FAT32 has a 32bit number for file size and ExFAT presumably has either a 64bit one
Correct.