[oi-dev] Porting an exFAT driver

John Howard echosoft.llc at gmail.com
Tue Dec 14 18:46:54 UTC 2021


Microsoft's exFAT is not royalty-free.  Distributers of devices pay
Microsoft.  Microsoft still owns submarine patents on exFAT.  We old-timers
have been down that road before.  It is true Microsoft published the
specification in 2019 and SDXC flash device organization standardizes on it.

It would be better to support FAT+ draft 2.  (See Wikipedia on FAT ref.
34).  FAT+ simply uses 38 bits for file size so up to 256 GiB is
supported.  The existing PCFS should be modified to at least be FAT+
aware.  DR-DOS and FDOS support FAT+.

Neither exFAT nor FAT+ provide journaling.  Microsoft's patents expired on
FAT32 and VFAT Long File Names.  That is why exFAT 64 bit file size support
now exists.  Just a useless waste of resources.

On 4:58AM, Tue, Dec 14, 2021 Jean-Pierre André <jean-pierre.andre at wanadoo.fr
wrote:

> I have been trying to package for OpenIndiana a driver and utilities
> developed by Andrew Nayenko and licensed as GPL2 for the exFAT file
> system promoted by Microsoft as a replacement for FAT.
>
> The packaging went fine locally (by gmake publish), but the pull
> request check fails on :
>
> aclocal: error: aclocal: file '/usr/share/aclocal/wxwin.m4' does not exist
> (see https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland/pull/7389)
>
> I have no idea of what triggers this, and as this does not occur
> locally, I cannot make my own tries. I suspect having a difference of
> versions in my autotools (fully updated). I also suspected the use of
> the deprecated macro AC_PROG_CC_C99 had something do do with that,
> but removing it does not bring any change.
>
> I am at a loss over what else I could try, so I am giving up until
> somebody points me at what I am doing wrong.
>
> Jean-Pierre
>
>
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> oi-dev at openindiana.org
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>
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