> It's a bit of a shame Microsoft didn't push and open up exFAT earlier and allowed FAT32 to become an issue again, only with removable flash drives and memory cards this time
Erm, because that was the idea? SDXC is a big racket and Microsoft has been collecting patent fees from any kind of consumer device that's capable of reading memory cards thanks to the filesystem requirements in the standard.
> That was 2006...If that's your reference on Microsoft's standards support, it's not the full picture.
The new standard for high capacity SD Cards - SDXC - specifies a filesystem in the standard. That filesystem is exFAT, a proprietary, patent-encumbered filesystem from Microsoft.
Microsoft like to make out that they're an all new and open company, but they were a nasty company in the past, and they're a nasty company now.
>Unfortunately, exFAT has been adopted by the SD Association as the default file system for SDXC cards larger than 32 GB. In our view, this should never have happened, as it forces anyone who wants to access SDXC cards to get a license from Microsoft, basically making this a field owned by Microsoft.
So, this is a bit of a cultural/perception gap between FOSS developers and standards bodies. Most standards bodies have a patent policy of "as long as all the standards-essential patents are licensable for a uniform fee, we're good". Convincing patent holders to not extract royalties from their patents for the sake of easing the lives of FOSS implementers is much, much harder[0].
Microsoft isn't even the only SEP holder for SD, and the standard makes no attempt at being a royalty-free standard. In fact, early SD standards were NDA'd[1] and prohibited FOSS implementation at all.
[0] In fact, so hard that the EU has a conspiracy theory that Google/AOM bullied a patent holder into doing this
[1] Remember, SD cards were basically MMC with primitive DRM
> 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 and actually on the smaller size for 4K and 8K recording sessions) is written and accessed between the two file systems. BigFAT says that the file would be written in 4GB chunks; is there something similar happening with exFAT or is the file "one chunk?" (Apologies if I have the terms wrong -- I'm not a filesystem expert.) The author laments that the exFAT format has been adopted for SDXC cards but given who all is in this group and what their use cases are I can discount "because Microsoft strong-armed them" as a reason for them selecting it.
>TIL: In 2019, Microsoft released the exFAT [1] specs [...] I.e. exFAT should now be preferred over FAT/NTFS for media used across different operating systems.
You seem to be very optimistic about how fast these get implemented into embedded devices.
> 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.
Ehh, Microsoft only opened exFAT after smartphones dropped all SD card slots and it was no longer possible for them to extort Android device manufacturers with patent licensing.
> To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations.
Straight from their FAQ:
We see emFile customers asking for solutions for bigger files. Implementing exFAT is not an option for us, as it is patent encumbered. SEGGER would need Microsoft's permission to implement and offer it, and our customers need to deal with Microsoft again to be able to use it in their products. This can be time-consuming and also expensive. We feel there should be a free alternative. The more popular BigFAT becomes, the better.
I guess using anything but FAT would make it hard for their developer base.
You need to support it if you want to properly support removable SD cards.
Microsoft managed to make their patent encumbered exFAT file system a required part of the SDXC card spec, just as their much-abused patents on FAT32 were expiring.
I guess it is gracious of them to partially undo the damage they've done, now that they have given up on Windows Phone.
Oh please! You can't honestly believe that Microsoft didn't exert any pressure to get exFAT specified as the filesystem? There was no reason to specify a filesystem in the standard at all. SATA drives don't have a 'specified filesystem' now do they?
But even assuming that Microsoft had nothing to do with exFAT being adopted as the SDXC filesystem (yeah, right) it still relates as MS could have released the exFAT specification and they could have released the filesystem from licensing.
That would have been sign of them being a more open company, allowing integration with other OSs, but instead it just looks like since they failed to kill off OSS, they're now trying to own it. Same old Microsoft.
The SDXC card format specifies exFAT as a mandatory feature - a proprietary, patent-encumbered filesystem from Microsoft. This makes it very difficult to legally support these SD cards in Open Source operating systems.
When they stop pulling crap like that, maybe I'll believe in the "new Microsoft".
> exFAT is probably better in terms of cross platform compatibility and addresses a lot of the limitations of FAT while remaining portable.
Still it is a shame that we're kept back literally decades when it comes to file exchange due to corporate culture polluting every corner of IT. Ensuring file export options plus file formats full documentation, should be among the most important requirements any software should satisfy to be even considered for professional use.
I gave you a succinct explanation of why exfat won't work everywhere, and you are basically denying that it's relevant. This attitude is reminding me what being a Microsoft employee was like.
Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn't enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card >=64GB before then, Linux wasn't mainlining support because the situation was too risky.
Erm, because that was the idea? SDXC is a big racket and Microsoft has been collecting patent fees from any kind of consumer device that's capable of reading memory cards thanks to the filesystem requirements in the standard.
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