Re: Kernel 2.6.25 broke iPod support for me, but who to bug?
Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> I traced the error back to a change in kernel 2.6.25: Apparently vfat
> file system can now become case sensitive in some cases
> ("FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems,
> filesystem will be case sensitive!")
> - kernel: I find it unlikely that the mentioned change was done without
> a good reason given its obvious behavioural change. So I guess the
> chances that it can be reversed are slim. But I might be wrong?
I have described one aspect of this issue in the bug report #417324:
"linux-2.6: UTF-8 is the system-wide default encoding in Debian but
kernel's filesystem modules use ISO-8859-1"
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=417324
In short: VFAT filesystem stores long filenames _always_ in UTF-16.
Since Debian doesn't use UTF-16, filename strings must always be
converted to some other encoding (and that's the option we give to mount
or to kernel at compile time). Debian's default is UTF-8 so the obvious
default for kernel's filesystem modules is also UTF-8. As you noticed,
the change was introduced in the Debian kernel 2.6.25.
There have been serious filename issues before the change. By default
Debian Etch (excluding KDE) writes complete garbage to VFAT filenames
(only ASCII characters work). Etch also interprets beyond-ASCII
filenames in VFAT wrong if they were written by a correctly configured
system (MS Windows, for example). I described the conversion problems in
#417324.
BTW, I'm using shortname=mixed succesfully here.
(I'm not a subscriber to -devel, so please Cc me, thanks.)
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