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Comment by rkangel | Hacker News Reader

FAT32 is a good choice IMO. It's the simplest of the "mainstream" filesystems.

Is it a good choice though? Isn't there a bunch of possible issues with FAT patents, in case someone wants to ship a product that boots, that could have been avoided by using something else?

(I don't know, I just have some vague memory of some Tomtom/Microsoft conflict due to FAT)

edit: user 'xxs' managed to type up the same issue before me (while I was typing mine).

I think only exFAT has patent issues? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT#Portability_and_adoption

Both have.

Yes you are absolutely right about the tomtom fiasco and they did end up paying MS.

correct me if I am wrong but it's still patented by Microsoft. Also time precision is up to even seconds (i.e. it can not store file stamp 'modified at 10:00:01')

FAT is only patented if you want long filenames. If 8~3 filenames are long enough (and for EFI boot they are) then you can use FAT32 with short names.

Additionally the specific EFI FAT32 implementation grants various patent rights which means you can implement EFI FAT32 (atleast, last time I checked by the situation)

The other restrictions of the FS barely matter since 99.9% of the time it's used as /boot it will be read from and has barely any activity. The data integrity can be insured by setting up secureboot (MS or User/Setup mode)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Patents

> Also time precision is up to even seconds (i.e. it can not store file stamp 'modified at 10:00:01')

In the pure form of the file system, yes, but with VFAT (which also adds long file names, creation time stamps, and access time stamps), the precision is exactly 1 second increments.

My main memory of VFAT comes from Windows 95 (or was it 98), I remember that when you saw this word anywhere, this meant your operating system is now borked beyond any repair.

If the patents haven't already expired, they're probably expiring very soon. Windows 95 which was the first to have the LFN feature came out more than 20 years ago.

With the sibling comment references: 2001-09-04 US6286013B1, so 2021. However that affect only long filenames which should be ok for EFI

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