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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

It's a real shame there is no modern and open equivalent filesystem. Instead you get your choice between legally encumbered exFAT, legally encumbered NTFS, and a bunch of unix filesystems where permissions screw up the universal R/W.

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You could chmod 777 the fs by default. That's not the problem. The problem are the proprietary os not recognizing the filesystem despite it being free to use and well documented. It's a commercial strategy, not a technical problem.

We could have way better than fat32 on cards. Ms and apple just don't want to make that any easier for you.

There's also the umask, which by default will create all new files without write permission for anyone but the original UID. So now you have to either change your umask or do a chmod after creating a new file.

With ZFS you can set the property to just inherit ACLs and ignore umask. What you’re describing is just a problem with a specific implementation (lack of feature).

In linux you can set the umask to a certain value for usb storage devices when automounting, so again, the other os could do it. Still not a technical problem.

The feature you are talking about only applies to FAT or NTFS filesystems.

In other words, even if only Linux existed you couldn't have a universally R/W usb stick without FAT or NTFS.

You can with bindfs minus a perf penalty

But honestly i would be fine with ms making ntfs a free open standard so we can get better support for it.

If I follow you, I don't think MS and Apple are the problem here.

Storage vendors are going to use the lowest common denominator because of all the older hardware out there that wouldn't work with a newer filesystem.

And most of the people buying USB thumb drives and whatnot are just going to use whatever the drive comes with.

You don't follow me. It would be super easy for ms and apple to adopt a better lowest comon denominator.

I'm always mildly surprised that UDF, the filesystem for DVD discs, isn't used more on USB sticks. It's r/w on the major three operating systems. The only downside is that I think you need to create it in the first place on Linux. (Maybe macOS can format UDF too?)

The major OSs all behave differently depending on if the media with the UDF volume has a partition table or not, among other strange implementation quirks, because nobody expects it to be used outside of optical media.

But since UDF reserves the first 2 KB, you can put a partition table on your medium, and let the first partition start at sector 0. Usually partition programs complain about this, but the file system driver lets it pass.

True, but it's a hack. And as far as I can UDF still suffers from the unix permissions issue.

There used to be a bug in the Linux version of the filesystem that prevented partitions of above 70MB or so to be created (shortints FTW!); however, that is fixed now.

Far worse is it that there is no good, unencumbered (looking at you CDDL license) version of UDF fsck.

Are you trying to imply the CDDL code is somehow “encumbered”?

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