Support file system exFAT?

[stambeccuccio]

Will we have the support to the file system exFAT (FAT64)?
Is there a simple plug-in for this?
Android devices support exFAT so I can't use the same external devices with ASUS router.
It is truly incomprehensible and annoying this aspect.
I don't know, I don't think.. is it very complicated to introduce the support (and compatibility) with file system exFAT and not just NTFS?
Thank You

 

[ColinTaylor]

Given that exFAT is Microsoft proprietary software I would guess that Asus would have to license it from Paragon or Tuxera. There is fuse-exfat but I don't know what the legal position would be if it were included in Merlins "distribution".

 

[ColinTaylor]

Didn't we discuss this exactly one year ago?

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/exfat-support.24091/

 

[stambeccuccio]

Didn't we discuss this exactly one year ago?
http://www.snbforums.com/threads/exfat-support.24091/

Ohhh... thank You!
I didn't remember it.
So, any way .. "repetita iuvant"

 

[Mike808]

Reference for ASUS filesystem support on USB drives:
http://event.asus.com/2009/networks/disksupport/

And yes, no exFAT support due to Microsoft licensing burden.
Asus firmware options on the AC-68R are FAT32, NTFS, or HFS.

 

[sfx2000]

Will we have the support to the file system exFAT (FAT64)?

This has been asked and answered a few times - the challenge is that exFAT is patent encumbered, and Microsoft is willing and happy to sell a license - and defend their IP.

That being said - there are two different approaches - neither of which is really palatable...

First is the FUSE driver - exfat-fuse, which is in many mainline distribution repo's, like Ubuntu, Debian, etc - in debian it's as simple as apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

The FUSE driver works, but one has to consider all the overhead of FUSE in the first place, so performance is less than optimal.

Then there is the Samsung exfat-nofuse driver developed for their Android devices, which was accidentally published on GitHub some time back, and pulled once someone thought about the upstream licensing - but since it use many GPL specific symbols, efforts were successful at forcing the driver itself to be released as GPL - search around GitHub, and you'll find more than one copy of that drop, or you can source it direct from Samsung via their GPL portal.

Integrating that exfat-nofuse driver into AsusWRT - for Asus, or Third Party Firmware distro's, is problematic, as again, it is IP encumbered, so Asus would have to license exFAT from Microsoft, and pay the toll - same would likely go for third party developers if they attempted to include it.

That being said - nothing wrong with downloading the driver, building the kernel module against whatever kernel is in place, and doing on one's own.

 

[RMerlin]

Microsoft can burn in hell with that proprietary filesystem.

And the industry should have known better than join into that cash grab. Ext4 would have been a great filesystem to use on removable medias that needed to support larger space, it would be licence-free, and would work out of the box on the vast majority of mobile devices on the market with zero additional licensing or even software development, as the majority runs Linux or a derivative. Already part of the kernel.

 

[Trebuin]

I have a reminder set to ask the same question in exactly 1 year!

 

[sfx2000]

And the industry should have known better than join into that cash grab. Ext4 would have been a great filesystem to use on removable medias that needed to support larger space, it would be licence-free, and would work out of the box on the vast majority of mobile devices on the market with zero additional licensing or even software development, as the majority runs Linux or a derivative. Already part of the kernel.

I think the big challenge here is that ext4 is not native to Windows or Mac on the desktop without third party support.

Which gets us back to the whole licensing thing - if Mac/Win were to support ext4 natively...

I think that's something they want to avoid.

 

[sfx2000]

Hmm... reminds me, I'll have to check and see what happens with an ext4 formatted thumbdrive/sdcard is inserted into a Chromebook...

Care to bet it works?

 

[sfx2000]

Cool - if a Chromebook sees a USB drive that has a unformatted linux partition* - it'll format it as ext4 and mount it just fine.

So that's solved...

* if the drive partitions have been nuked and fdisk creates a linux partition... note that most thumbdrives these days have a FAT32 partition and an MBR (or maybe GPT) map in place.

 

[RMerlin]

I think the big challenge here is that ext4 is not native to Windows or Mac on the desktop without third party support.

Which gets us back to the whole licensing thing - if Mac/Win were to support ext4 natively...

I think that's something they want to avoid.

Nothing stopping the industry from getting together, and providing a free Windows driver. Remember how USB was first added through third party drivers, until they became integrated into Windows itself. It`s just a matter of the industry deciding they're tired of paying Microsoft taxes for extFat, for the various patents they claim to be part of Android, and so on and so on.

A few years ago, someone came up with the income Microsoft were getting off Android-related patents. It made sense for them not to bother that much with pushing for a valid mobile marketbase - all they had to do was sit back, and collect royalties off Android.

Once again, the whole software patent issue is something in needs of being brought up to speed with the 21st century.

 

[Trebuin]

I just tried upgrading my drive from ext3 to ext4...the restore resulted in crashes on my Mac using the paragon drivers . The router seems to handle it, though it will take forever for 3.5TB of data to restore :/

 

[john9527]

I had added exFAT support to my LTS fork last year for the AC56/AC68 (ported over from Tomato as a bunch of kernel commits). All was good until I updated the kernel to support the newer rev ARM processors. Then everything broke with symbol errors and I had to back it out.

Those that are running the legacy 'L' builds of my fork on the early rev AC68s still have it available.

 

[sfx2000]

Nothing stopping the industry from getting together, and providing a free Windows driver. Remember how USB was first added through third party drivers, until they became integrated into Windows itself. It`s just a matter of the industry deciding they're tired of paying Microsoft taxes for extFat, for the various patents they claim to be part of Android, and so on and so on.

I would agree - simply put, with exFAT, the ball is indeed in Microsoft's court - it's not the Samsung code, that's GPL - it's the patent, and like it or not, it is there. Yes, it's ugly...

FAT and SMB/CIFS have become lingua-franca across most common platforms. exFAT isn't there yet - through legal challenges that opened up SMB perhaps, but I'm not holding my breath there.