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Immediately following Microsoft’s announcement, an old version of Samsung’s exFAT Linux driver that was in legal limbo for years was submitted to the staging area of Linux 5.4. While Microsoft still holds patents on exFAT, its announcement means that the thousands of members of the free-to-join Open Invention Network - of which Microsoft is a part of - can freely use the technology in their Linux-based products as it’s covered under the OIN’s Linux System definition.
The situation changed in August of 2019, when Microsoft published the technical specification for exFAT and endorsed its addition to the Linux kernel. Either way, someone has to pay to support exFAT, whether that be the consumer or the OEM (which trickles down to the consumer anyway).
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Paragon Software even directly offers an app to end consumers that enables mounting exFAT drives without system integration, but the app requires an in-app purchase to unlock support for each supported file system.
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Some OEMs like Samsung wrote their own exFAT drivers after paying the licensing fee, while others integrated solutions from Microsoft’s partners Paragon Software or Tuxera.
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Given the widespread use of exFAT in consumer storage devices, many Android OEMs bit the bullet and paid Microsoft so they could ship exFAT support in their phones and tablets. In order to ship exFAT support in your device, you’d need to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft. The problem with supporting exFAT is that it’s a proprietary file system, developed and patented by Microsoft. After all, removable storage devices are meant to be read and written to from multiple devices.
The SD Association even calls for all SDXC cards over 32GB in capacity to be formatted in exFAT.īecause exFAT is used in so many removable storage devices, it’s especially important that all platforms you’d plug those storage devices into support the file system. Since its introduction in 2006, the file system has been used by millions of devices. Compared to FAT32, exFAT has a higher file size limit (16 exabytes versus 4GB) and optimizations for flash memory devices like USB flash drives and SD cards. exFAT: From proprietary to openĮxFAT, which stands for Extensible File Allocation Table, is the successor to the FAT32 file system. Every week, my Android Dessert Bites column will share the latest news about the Android platform that matters to system engineers, app developers, and power users. Thanks for signing up for The Android Edge newsletter.
In this week’s edition of Android Dessert Bites, I’ll talk briefly about the history of exFAT in Linux and explain how support for it is enabled in Android. From what I can see, there’s no reason why the Pixel 6 series couldn’t have supported exFAT drives at launch, because there’s actually nothing special about Android 13 that enables support for them.
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In the Linux kernel that ships with the Pixel 6 Pro on both Android 12L and Android 13, this list includes exFAT.Īfter a bit of digging, I discovered what the Android 13 beta had that the stable Android 12L build didn’t that allowed for native exFAT support. The /proc/filesystems file lists the file systems supported by the kernel. I then inserted the same flash drive into another Pixel 6 Pro running the Android 13 beta, and voilà, it worked! When I inserted an exFAT-formatted USB-C flash drive into a Pixel 6 Pro running the latest stable Android 12L build, however, it wasn’t recognized. The Pixel 6 series fits the bill, and they’re the perfect devices to test on because no Google phone to date has had native support for exFAT. Many people in the Android space (myself included) must have forgotten about this, though, since it takes a while for new Linux kernel features to trickle down to Android devices because of the way Android is architected (though things are getting better).įortunately, something like exFAT support is really easy to test, so all I had to do was find an Android device with Linux kernel 5.10 or later to test on. I remembered that several years back, proper exFAT support made its way to the mainline Linux kernel, so it was only a matter of time for support to arrive on all Android devices. I don’t remember what led me to that page (I just randomly click on things until I find something interesting), but I remember what stuck out to me: the line about exFAT being supported in kernel 5.10 and later. While I was doing my daily search for interesting things to write about, I came across this page in the AOSP documentation that lists all the file systems supported by the kernel.
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