Re: [PATCH] staging: exfat: add exfat filesystem code to staging

[Sasha Levin]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 07:18:16PM -0400, Valdis KlÄtnieks wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Aug 2019 22:56:31 +0200, Pali Roh?r said:
>
> > I'm not really sure if this exfat implementation is fully suitable for
> > mainline linux kernel.
> >
> > In my opinion, proper way should be to implement exFAT support into
> > existing fs/fat/ code instead of replacing whole vfat/msdosfs by this
> > new (now staging) fat implementation.
>
> > In linux kernel we really do not need two different implementation of
> > VFAT32.
>
> This patch however does have one major advantage over "patch vfat to
> support exfat" - which is that the patch exists.
>
> If somebody comes forward with an actual "extend vfat to do exfat" patch,
> we should at that point have a discussion about relative merits....

This patch going into staging doesn't necessarily mean that one day
it'll get moved to fs/exfat/. It's very possible that the approach would
instead be to use the staging code for reference, build this
functionality in fs/fat/, and kill off the staging code when it's not
needed anymore.

With regards to missing specs/docs/whatever - our main concern with this
release was that we want full interoperability, which is why the spec
was made public as-is without modifications from what was used
internally. There's no "secret sauce" that Microsoft is hiding here.

How about we give this spec/code time to get soaked and reviewed for a
bit, and if folks still feel (in a month or so?) that there are missing
bits of information related to exfat, I'll be happy to go back and try
to get them out as well.

--
Thanks,
Sasha