[oi-dev] Porting an exFAT driver

[Jean-Pierre André]

John Howard wrote on 12/14/21 7:46 PM:
> 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.

AFAIK exFAT is now free to open source implementations, but I have
not taken a lawyer advice. I leave it to the OpenIndiana community
to decide whether there is a place for exFAT in its ecosystem.

I have no personal interest in it, I ported this exFAT implementation
only because I had to reboot on Windows to play a presentation by a
colleague on a USB key. A real-life situation.

Jean-Pierre

> 
> 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 <mailto: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
>