FDOS/kernel

Whether Freedos support exfat in the future ?

Opened this issue · 2 comments

Whether Freedos support exfat in the future ?

lss4 commented

There were some discussions here.

And AFAIK there were also some very old discussions in FreeDOS mailing lists regarding this matter, but from what I could put together, supporting exFAT in DOS at this point will not necessarily overcome FAT32's 4GB file barrier.

short answer, don't expect it soon and don't expect when available to support pre 386 computers because it will need 64 bit support. long answer yes, but to make it useful there are several places in the kernel effected and some may cause compatibility issues. support will likely be published with or shortly after gpt (guid partition table) support is published as it involves adding 64bit support (i need to create helper math routines for gcc-i16, currently i only have them for openwatcom). currently I am tracking windows 3 issues around locking but with limited time it's taking longer than I wanted. exfat support will be optional and possibly only published in source form. the filesystem is not much more complex than fat but the use of unicode names is something I haven't researched yet how best to handle. lfn support will have to be involved and currently that is generic tsr.