Compelling reasons to switch ? [LWN.net]

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 20:10 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Compelling reasons to switch ? by jem
Parent article: Filesystem medley: EROFS, NTFS, and XFS

UDF looks nice in but I'm afraid it's poorly maintained - including on Windows!

exFAT is probably a better choice now.

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Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 2:08 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (1 responses)

Jan Kara maintains UDF, and I'm not aware of any outstanding problems or patches that are unduly delayed. Sure, there's not a huge flux of patches, but that's to be expected, I think.

It'd be nice if it were converted to use iomap instead of buffer_heads. If anyone's looking for a filesystem project ...

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 9:10 UTC (Mon) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link]

> Jan Kara maintains UDF, and I'm not aware of any outstanding problems or patches that are unduly delayed.

The main reason for not using UDF as a data exchange format is not the Linux support in my eyes, but the rather non-optimal support on other platforms. Reading from UDF works on other platforms from my experience, but in the past I've had trouble writing to UDF filesystems on Windows - sometimes it just didn't work, with no apparent reason for the failure.

UDF is nice in theory, but in practice exFAT is probably what's here to stay for simple data exchange.