On 10/03/2010 14:47, Jon Dowland wrote:
Last time this was asked someone suggested UDF, which I thought was novel. You can stick a UDF filesystem onto a block device from Debian using "mkudffs" in the "udftools" package. What nobody has clarified is whether this can be witnessed from a co-installed Windows...
If you format with the right options, then it works in both Linux and Windows. Just a case of picking the right blocksize; for some reason Windows is picky and can only use one size. I tried this a couple of weeks back (before switching to ext2), and while it initially appeared to work, I ran into problems.
While df [-i] showed that only a small fraction of the total datablocks and inodes were used, I was unable to create any more files or directories after copying about 100 GiB of data over to the UDF filesystem. At that point, mkdir, touch etc. would all fail with ENOSPC.
This wasn't a UDF issue, it was a Linux issue. Taking the same disk and using it in Windows, I could continue to fill up the filesystem with more files which were then readable in Linux, but I still couldn't create new files nor append to old ones. Probably a bug in the udf filesystem driver? I'd report it, but I'm not sure of the best place (the sources don't look like they have an active maintainer from a quick git clone). I'm also going to stick with ext2 for the time being since I can get a sustained transfer rate of ~65MiB/sec which I just never came close to with NTFS as it was maxing out the CPU (this is all on an external FireWire 800 drive).
Regards, Roger