News Microsoft Brought exFAT File System to Linux, But Some Devs Aren't Happy

[Admin]

Microsoft announced that it's supporting the addition of its exFAT file system technology to the Linux kernel. But developers were quick to voice their displeasure.

Microsoft Brought exFAT File System to Linux, But Some Devs Aren't Happy : Read more

 

[iborco]

The Linux developers said the driver is a "pile of crap", not the specs from Microsoft. Is this how you check your sources?

Longtime kernel developer Christoph Hellwig was quick to criticize the code for re-implementing large parts of the kernel's existing FAT driver and called this new driver a "pile of crap".

 

[muser99]

Are we witnessing Windows slowly blending into Linux here? Microsoft has become very open source friendly of late, eg Edge is becoming Chrome based. Will Windows slowly become a wrapper around Linux?

 

[valdis.kletnieks]

Accuracy comment from the guy at ground zero...

The primary complaint appears to be that Microsoft re-implemented much of the Linux kernel's existing FAT driver rather than building exFAT on top of that driver.

s/Microsoft/Samsung/

There's also technical issues involved - the code started off life as an out-of-tree driver, and it's really hard to build "out of tree" on top of an in-tree driver.

Now that the code is headed for in-tree status, there's a lot more flexibility to where to go with it. Some people want it to mount exfat only, others want something that will do fat16/fat32/exfat, and it's possible that once the code is cleaned up more, it becomes more obvious how to add the equivalent functionality to the current in-tree vfat driver.

I'm not married to any particular approach, as long as it results in a stable in-tree exfat driver.

(And if you think the code is ugly now, you should have seen it as I got it. I think I'm now at 1,500 lines of code heaved over the side entirely, another 3,000 or so restructured and relocated. It's gone from 28 source files down to 10.