I'll believe Microsoft loves Linux when I can install Microsoft Office in my desktop Linux machine. Everything else is marketing.<p>Edit: to expand, the corporate world runs on Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook. Microsoft milks them on Windows/Office licensing and is very aggressive against organizations that try to do Linux deployments. They're a convicted monopolist that got away easily when at some point the option on the table was to split OS and Office into two different companies. If they want to continue to use Office to keep Windows dominant that's their strategy. WSL and their other "love Linux" efforts are all about making sure developers stay on Windows. If you want to do all that fine but don't patronize us by then claiming you love Linux.
The IMHO extremely relevant point is in the very end of the actual specifications:<p><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-...</a><p>>26-Aug-2019
Seventh release of the Basic Specification, which includes the following changes:<p>Updated legal terms pertaining to the specification, including:<p>Removal of Microsoft Confidential notice<p>Removal of Microsoft Corporation Technical Documentation
License Agreement section<p>Updated copyright notice to 2019<p>Till now the documentation wasn't AFAIK publicly available or it was anyway "restricted".
The big deal here is the patent grant. FAT related patents were held over linux like a gun in the Ballmer years. Its a reason Linux was stuck with 8.3 length filenames for so long.
I don't mean for this question to sound inflammatory but I can't help but think: why does this matter? You can already use exFAT on Linux via FUSE, and as pointed out by VentureBeat:<p>> To be clear, Microsoft isn’t open-sourcing exFAT — but it is making sure anyone building with Linux can use it. 'It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence.'<p>exFAT is still not open source, and still can't be distributed with the kernel. So what changed? It will now be easier to integrate it into a <i>custom</i> kernel instead of using FUSE? Why is this better than the current situation, where you'd install exfat-utils for example? Are there benefits of using a kernel module that I'm missing which makes this important news?
Does this affect anything outside the Linux kernel? Will *BSDs be able to use the specs without patent fears? What about microcontrollers, and the Arduino community?
OMG, I can't believe we finally have a cross platform read/write disk format. At last. No more Fuse. I just need to know when it will be available for my Raspberry Pi.
Thanks MS. Would also like to see ext4 support in Windows and better NTFS support under Linux. Then the turnaround (on the technical side at least) will be complete.
When will we have a modern file system that “just works” for read and write on Windows, Linux and Mac without the need to buy some proprietary product or depend on some open source option that may not be maintained or 100% reliable?<p>Seems like going over the network is the easiest option for people who use multiple OSes, though it comes with incompatibilities in permissions, ownership and also comes with a speed hit.<p>I doubt if Apple would provide implementations of APFS for non-Apple operating systems. So that probably leaves Microsoft to push NTFS (since ReFS isn’t a common option anymore as per Wikipedia) if it desires. But Microsoft seems to be on a cost cutting mode (cf the adoption of Chromium in Edge).<p>Are there viable and good options suitable for these three operating systems?
Too little too late, with no acknowledgement of Ballmer-era exclusivity, bullying. It’s progress, but progress without awareness of baggage in the room.
MS wants a native kernel fs compatible with Windows so they can improve WSL. Today's virtualized kernel pays an unecessary price to access ext4 FS
Meanwhile, ntfs-3g[1] wasn't updated for years and looks like totally dead. Last version is of March 28, 2017.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/</a>
Almost every months Microsoft make a more or less major gift to the open source community, this is beautiful.
They are the new "benevolent" Google and it's no surprise they're now the number one open source contributor of the world.
Thanks Microsoft and the developers there for sharing ExFat!<p>It is great to see the changed attitude and embracing of open source software! This will ease the use of large external disks, sharing files between Windows and Linux systems. It will help with larger USB memory sticks which no longer needs to be reformatted. It will also make it much easier to deal with SD cards from cameras and mobile phones.
wan't Samsung providing a GPL-version of exFAT for Linux already? what's the difference assuming this news means we will have a native exFAT driver in kernel "soon".<p>Is exFAT only good for file storage considering it has no journal ling? putting rootfs on it may have a dysfunction system relatively easily without fsck I assume.
Big deal! This is right up there with Adobe Premiere on Windows finally getting a ProRes encoder at the top of my list of "Things That Would've Helped My FilmTech Career Around 6 years ago".<p>1) We finally have a file system that works across operating systems, which is a big deal if you ever do anything in a multi-OS environment.<p>2) exFAT is heavily used in the film production world, and the convenience of knowing it'll mount properly on any OS so you can duplicate it a few times is much more important than whether or not it's a "safer" file system in general. It doesn't need to survive forever -- the card just has to make it from the camera to the computer on the other side of the set, or survive a trip from one office to another on a shuttle drive that by this point is not the only place that data exists.<p>Regardless, it's still more mature in general than I remember it when it started to appear in high-end cameras around 2012/2013. When your Blackmagic camera shoots exFAT but isn't capable of deleting files off it without a computer...<p>3) Should something still go wrong (like, oh, the time I was almost responsible for losing $60k of footage my second day on a job due to unexpected use of exFAT + a truly unfortunate and odd-defying day of bad luck) the fact that Microsoft is implementing it in the kernel should still be a huge help -- it will be a proper implementation (not a reverse-engineered sometimes-working mess), will perform much better than FUSE, and just generally improve reliability. Trust me, when your card with irreplaceable footage won't mount, you'd rather not have to fight that battle on two fronts, with one of them being your Linux implementation.
Is it worth formatting my external flash media as exFAT at this point if I find myself dual booting often? NTFS on Ubuntu is pretty well covered so that has been what I have been using. But if exFAT support is improving I'm wondering if it is worth switching over.
I haven't spun up anything in Azure for quite a while. Does anybody know if their default images use anything exFAT formatted? Doesn't UEFI/EFI binaries usually sit on exFAT?
> To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations.<p>How about their FAT patents??
I will believe Microsoft loves Linux when they decide to drop the development of their buggy NT kernel and starts to build windows on top of the mainline Linux kernel.<p>Everything else is just cheap marketing.