Support UDF for MicroSD filesystem. [released]
asked 2014-01-04 23:16:09 +0200
I don't like using FAT filesystems, especially on large flash media, and ext2/3/4 will collect file ownership and permissions, and won't work on Windows. Could you support the UDF filesystem for the MicroSD card? Cards formatted in UDF can be read and written by all major operating systems, it's flash-friendly and can be permission-free, and the tools to manage them are readily available for Linux. Plus it's platform neutral, which is just the kind of interoperability in no-mans-land that I see Jolla owning.
UDF is not well-suited for memory cards, is it? It seems F2FS would be a much better choice, as it was designed for SSDs and memory cards. And, as it happens, I don't really care whether Windows users are able to plug the SD card into their computers. Let the Windows users struggle for once - then I can tell them that there is an easy solution, switching to use GNU/Linux solves the problem ;-)
However, as F2FS is an initiative from Samsung, a large manufacturer of computers running Windows as the operating system, support for F2FS in Windows is not only likely to appear, it is planned (according to the Wikipedia article about F2FS).
Kjetil Kilhavn ( 2015-01-29 23:14:30 +0200 )editUDF was designed for early rewritable and write-once optical discs, which has the same packet writing and wear levelling requirements as flash media, so it's well suited. Support is very mature in all major operating systems and has been for a decade. It's main drawback right now is that there is no fsck for it on Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format#Compatibility
F2FS might end up being as well supported, but it'll remain immature for longer than the useful life of the current Jolla hardware.
Andy Branson ( 2015-01-30 00:50:02 +0200 )editAbout the fsck, I'm no expert, but I think it exists for Solaris: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0625/6j9vfilms/index.html I thought that Solaris is open source (which doesn't mean free per se), but maybe not this bit?
dimitridv ( 2015-02-03 00:41:09 +0200 )edit