Honestly, I’m more interested in reliability and mechanisms to prevent data loss…
Last I checked, the exFAT implementation that MS released to the public was missing some key features that made the Linux port less reliable, particularly for removable storage devices (making it not much better than old school FAT). Has that been fixed already?
Can someone explain to me how and when such a patch would make it into distros? For instance I’m running Debian 12, I’m guessing this won’t get added since they just released 13, so this will be put in to version 14 at some point? Or are kernel updates seperate from the distribution development?
This is a kernel driver, and yes, kernel updates are independent of distribution development, although distributions are typically built around certain kernel branches. Debian (stable) is relatively conservative, and doesn’t offer the latest, cutting edge kernel, but will eventually include a kernel with this driver available.
This probably won’t have much impact for most use cases, though.
This probably won’t have much impact for most use cases, though.
Yeah, I’m assuming it only affects operations on exFAT systems.
Not only that, but the effects are really only going to be noticeable on very large partitions/devices, like terabyte+ size. The typical thumb drive scenario will see no recognizable improvement in load speed. It’s still a nice improvement, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a change that translates to any real-world improvement for most user cases.
I had once considered using exFAT for my external HDD, back when I was dual-booting.
This might have made a difference, had I gone ahead with that.
Thanks for the explaination, didn’t think i’d see a big difference anyway, but it showed me i didn’t know how this would at some poknt get to my machine. Thanks!
It really varies by the distro’s policies. If it gets into 6.18, for most distributions that means the next release that hasn’t had its version freeze will get it. For Ubuntu and its variants, if there are release candidates of 6.18 at the time of the kernel freeze for 25.10 then 25.10 will probably get it. Otherwise we’ll have to wait for 26.04.
Thanks!
