UDF FTW

Posted May 6, 2010 17:30 UTC (Thu) by Epicanis (guest, #62805)
In reply to: German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H) by callegar
Parent article: German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

I was quite annoyed to find my shiny new Linux-based Android phone did NOT support UDF. I was hoping to switch to UDF rather than patent-choked FAT for my cards.

I imagine one could simply recompile the Android kernel to support UDF, but from the messages I saw it appears that Android is possibly hard-coded to assume that the sdcard will always be Microsoft FAT format and will error out if that is not the case. (The Android kernel on my phone claims to support ext2 at least, but it still fails to mount ext2-formatted sdcards, giving me some kind of complaint about the FAT filesystem checker failing when trying to read the card...)

Dear Google: Please save us! optional UDF support in addition to FAT would be helpful...

Since every modern OS can read and write UDF just fine (I'm not counting XP as "modern", but even XP can at least READ UDF), and is suppposed to be POSIX compliant, it seems like a much better option for non-Windows devices...