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.

    • cm0002@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
      321·
      4 days ago

      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

        • cm0002@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          That’s actually crazy because windows these days actually defaults to formatting drives in exfat lmao

          • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            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.

            • cm0002@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
              2·
              3 days ago

              Do you do the initial formatting on the same windows machine? Maybe it’s fucking up the format process in some way

              • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.socialEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                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.

                • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  3·
                  3 days ago

                  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 🫩

        • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
          4·
          3 days ago

          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?”.