A patch for the open-source exFAT file-system driver for Linux can boost the sequential read performance by about 10% in preliminary tests.
There is a patch queued up into the exFAT driver's "dev" branch to support multi-cluster for the exfat_get_cluster code. Developer Chi Zhiling of China's Kylin OS worked on the patch and explained in the commit:
"This patch introduces a count parameter to exfat_get_cluster, which serves as an input parameter for the caller to specify the desired number of clusters, and as an output parameter to store the length of consecutive clusters.
This patch can improve read performance by reducing the number of get_block calls in sequential read scenarios. speacially in small
cluster size.
According to my test data, the performance improvement is approximately 10% when read FAT_CHAIN file with 512 bytes of cluster size.
454 MB/s -> 511 MB/s"
With the patch now part of exFAT's dev branch, it's possible we will see this exFAT read performance improvement merged for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window. This is just one of several great performance optimizations observed in recent times for this exFAT adaptation for Linux.
Does anyone even use exfat? What's the use case?
Full native cross compatibility with basically everything modern, if you need a drive to work between Linux, Mac and windows or even a device like a Blu-ray player that's exfat
It's fat32, but better and without that annoying 4GB file limitation
I've never been able to get Windows to read an exFAT drive for some reason.
That's actually crazy because windows these days actually defaults to formatting drives in exfat lmao
Fuckin right? I've formatted at least a couple different flash drives with exfat and taken them to various places to print stuff off of them and the drive never actually shows up when I plug it in. Switching it to NTFS or FAT32 always works, and I end up cursing out Microsoft every time.
Do you do the initial formatting on the same windows machine? Maybe it's fucking up the format process in some way
Nope, I don't have any Windows machines so it's all done through fdisk and mkfs. I do use GPT instead of MBR but I didn't think that would matter.
There's the answer, Windows loves doing this bs.
I've had multiple occasions where Windows couldn't read a Fat32 drive formatted somewhere else, had to format it on Windows first.
Nowadays I don't even try anymore, I do it from from a VM directly
I am untethered and my rage knows no bounds.
it's basically slightly better fat32 so many devices use it e.g. my tv
Mostly cameras, they all format SD cards in exFAT now.
Removable media and sd cards?
How do you want the USB drive to work with linux and windows otherwise???
I don't?
I just asked. Nothing more.
You asked a very loaded question, implying seeing no use for the file system and/or no point to these optimizations as a result.
If you genuinely didn't know what exFAT is used for, or what is a common use of it is, you could've asked just that. Like "what is exFAT used for" or "I've never heard of this, an I using this and just don't know it?".
Or just looked at the Wikipedia page
You're overthinking the situation.
You see that USB flash drive in the thumbnail?