Re: [PATCH] fs: Introducing Lanyard Filesystem

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 01:06:20AM +0200, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez wrote:
> 
> > I also seriously question the niche of people who want to use a thumb
> > drive to transfer > 4GB files.  Try it sometime and see what a painful
> > user experience it is....
> 
> Think for example on consumer devices, for example on most moderns TV
> you can plug a USB memory disk with videos and play them.

More and more consumer devices, including TV's, are network-enabled.
I'm not at all convinced the USB memory disk model is the one which
makes sense --- you can make a much better user experience work if you
can rely on networking.  That way you don't have to move USB storage
devices around, and USB storage devices are *slow* when the most
common types are HDD's and crappy flash devices.  How many people are
going to drop several hundred dollars for a USB-attached SSD, when
using a networking transfer mechanism is much more convenient?

> And I doubt that the majority of this consumer devices are able to read
> nothing more than FAT32 file-systems, so the 4GB limit is a big problem.
> And here is where Microsoft is pushing their exFAT FS since it allows
> working with 4GB+ files without the NTFS overhead.

We'll see how popular a heavily IP-encumbered file system will be,
especially given that its main use case is for devices which are so
constrained that they can't afford to use a "real file system" (like
ntfs or ext4 or some other more sophisticated file system), but which
nevertheless needs to be able to handle 4GB+ files.

I'm sure there will be some use cases that might fit that niche, but
it seems pretty tiny.  And this is completely ignoring what might
happen if in the future people take 1gig fiber connections to the home
(such as what many people in Kansas City will be enjoying very
shortly) for granted....

> As a side note, it would be possible to write a driver for exFAT and get
> it merged upstream on the Linux Kernel without "breaking any law"?
> Goggling I found an attempt to write such driver but seems that never
> got merged:  https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/2/8/24

You'll need to talk to a lawyer about that, since that's fundamentally
a legal question.

Regards,

						- Ted
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