Author Topic: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?  (Read 17089 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« on: November 27, 2020, 08:35:47 pm »
The subject says it all...what have you picked/installed, and why?

I ask b/c I have had the Netlabs 0.9.13 release on my machine from quite some time now. It has worked for me quite well since the extent of using FATanything was to simply pull the pics off of my digital camera. That's a FAT32 card, easy to mount, easy to copy off of, done!

However, as storage capacities got larger and now it's somewhat easy to have a multi-gig FAT device I figured I should perhaps update my install.

Now, here is the decision point: run with the updated Netlabs release, or move over to AN one? If I understood the AN release notes, their goal is to have the basic FAT32 capability, no other fancy stuff. Seems simple enough....but that also appears to really narrow things down to just the stuff that's pure FAT32 as opposed to having capability to mount exFAT, etc.

So I'm curious how others have gone about this? What have you deployed, why and how is that working for you?

Thanks!

ivan

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #1 on: November 27, 2020, 08:56:57 pm »
Sorry Dariusz, can't help you much there regarding use with a camera since I use Cameraderie v1.5.3 by Rich Walsh with all my Nikon DSLR cameras.  It even works with the over size card in my D60 without problems, in fact the only time I take a card out of the camera is if I need to change it because it is full and even then I replace it to get the pictures off it.

Doug Bissett

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #2 on: November 27, 2020, 11:48:45 pm »
I don't even consider using anything except the AN FAT32 driver. It seems to have a problem, or two, but nothing as bad as what 9.13 has (I don't even remember what the problems were). I did try the other one (with ExFAT, and FAT16, support), but decided that it wasn't really any better, and the FAT16 was interfering with the old OS/2 FAT16 support (not to mention the questionable legality of using it). At the time, I had no need for ExFAT, and still don't. It seems that nobody is using ExFAT anymore, even Microsoft doesn't seem to be pushing it.

Today, I use my cell phone as a camera. It takes better pictures than my old HP digital camera ever did (and that was better than my old Nikon  film cameras). I got a short adapter cable, so I could plug a USB stick into it (formatted FAT32), and copy things to that, then to my computer. At one time, I did get the phone to transfer directly, probably using Cameraderie, but that was more difficult than using the USB stick.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2020, 02:54:01 am »
Hi

If I recall correctly, on why AN decided to fork FAT32, it was because of the exFat support on the Netlabs version. exFAT is patented by Microsoft, and even than MS pinky swear to not sue, it was too risky to include it to ArcaOS. AN does not have the resources to fight a monster like Microsoft if the want to "negotiate" a patent fee.  This is an interesting article about the exFAT patents and use license.

Regards
« Last Edit: November 28, 2020, 04:21:00 pm by Martin Iturbide »
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Lars

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #4 on: November 28, 2020, 09:52:49 am »
I use the latest FAT32 from Netlabs.
For once, I don't have AN.
The other reason was, that I can finally format a dump partition up to 4 GB with FAT16 (by selecting a 64k cluster size) which allows to use the original OS2DUMP (that only dumps to FAT16 partitions) without the need to install DUMPFS.
There are also commandline switches that control what FAT16 partitions are served by FAT32 and which are controlled by the kernel built-in FAT16,you just have to use them.
The latest version is stable and works fine for me. The latest version is newer than the one announced on the Netlabs WIKI.
« Last Edit: November 28, 2020, 09:57:32 am by Lars »

Rich Walsh

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2020, 10:22:49 am »
The current Netlabs version is an outstanding example of undisciplined design.

What started out as a FAT32 driver morphed into an exFAT/FAT12/FAT16-and oh yeah-FAT32 driver with no appreciable improvements in speed or code quality. Then it went off into outer space with the ability to mount disk images from various VMs, and finally, a Unix-style loop adapter that requires a new BASEDEV.

What does a BASEDEV that mounts disk images as drives have to do with a FAT32 filesystem driver?

I'd love to have a loop adapter to mount images, and I wouldn't mind downloading an exFAT driver from a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize s/w patents - and I could accept less than sterling software quality if they were packaged separately. But when it comes to saving my data in a format that has become a must-have (i.e. FAT32), I want something reliable, not "feature-rich". For that, I use AN's version.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #6 on: November 28, 2020, 04:13:09 pm »
The current Netlabs version is an outstanding example of undisciplined design.

Sometimes the issue is that we have, what we have. I would love for the community to have the resources to create software with features, reliability, code quality, new standards and great discipline. But sometimes we have to settle with "it works or not".

If there will developers willing to create the greatest FAT32 driver with exFAT support with the best practices I would love it, but I think there is a priority for different drivers first, or even to improve the GUI with more modern concepts in mind.

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Lars

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #7 on: November 28, 2020, 06:30:56 pm »
The BASEDEV is a separate sub package in the WPI. You don't have to install it and in fact, I did not.
I was not too happy with the feature overload either but it's difficult to complain if it is for free :-)

Heikki Kekki

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #8 on: December 07, 2020, 10:51:38 am »
Today, I use my cell phone as a camera. It takes better pictures than my old HP digital camera ever did (and that was better than my old Nikon  film cameras). I got a short adapter cable, so I could plug a USB stick into it (formatted FAT32), and copy things to that, then to my computer. At one time, I did get the phone to transfer directly, probably using Cameraderie, but that was more difficult than using the USB stick.

I transfer pictures from my Android phone to my desktop computer using Samba share. I used Asus File Manager before because it was installed on my Sony Xperia phone when transferring data from an Asus Phablet. I currently use File Manager Plus. It's better, faster, and you can browse photos, for example, just like on your phone's Album.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #9 on: December 07, 2020, 03:42:25 pm »
I was transferring photos from my iPhone using FileBrowser and a Samba share on my OS/2 computer, but I now use iCloud running in the Firefox 45 browser to download the photos.

In theory, I should be able to configure Dropbox to make the photos available on the OS/2 desktop as drive through the NetDrive Dropbox plug-in, but it's a lot of configuring, and iCloud works well enough.
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Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #10 on: December 23, 2020, 05:25:12 am »
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. You all raised good points, some of them I agree with and some of them I do not, but I'll just leave it at that.

Alright, so I had a chance to test a few things out and there is nothing like a real number to tell the story, so here it goes.

1) Environment
I mentioned camera pics transfer because I'm talking about my Pentax K5-II DSLR. That simply accepts a storage card, which in my case is a Samsung Pro SDXC 32G card, that on my Android phone (Samsung S9) gets a 67M Read and 61M Write speeds. This card, using the very same USB stick but different hardware which runs a Win7 Pro install, shows a 13M Read and 7M Write speeds. The card is FAT32 formatted.

The card simply comes out of the DSLR's mount spot, I plug that into a reader stick, plug that puppy in and off I go. The card was previously configured to be LVM-aware, so it has it's own volume letter assigned.

The actual USB card reader specs are:

Code: [Select]
<<< Device Description >>>
 Type            : 01
 USB Rev         : 200
 Class           : Reserved (0)
 Subclass        : Reserved (0)
 Protocol        : Reserved (0)
  Device Information is defined at interface Level
 Max. packetsize : 40
 Vendor  ID      : 0BDA
 Product ID      : 0119
 Device Release# : 1985
 Strings:
  Manufacturer Name : Generic
  Product Name      : USB2.0-CRW
  Serial number     : 20090815198100000
 Number of Configurations : 1

 Configuration 0 :
  Lenght     : 32
  Name       : CARD READER
  Value      : 1
  Attributes : 0x80
  Power      : 500 mA
  Interfaces : 1

  Interface 0
   Alt Setting : 0
   Name        : <NONE>
   Class       : Storage Device
   SubClass    : SCSI transparent command set
   Protocol    : Bulk-Only Transport
   Endpoints   : 2

   Endpoint 0:
    Address     : 01
    Attributes  : 02
    Packetsize  : 0200
    Interval    : 0

   Endpoint 1:
    Address     : 82
    Attributes  : 02
    Packetsize  : 0200
    Interval    : 0

This is all plugged into my USB 2.0 port driven by the AOS USBEHCD 12.07 drivers.

2) Results
These are obtained by mounting the card and using LCMD filemanager to copy 12 JPG files off of the card onto a RAMDISK, files are approx 8-10M each in size.

OK, two stages here:

2a) 5.0.3.r171 AOS FAT32 install
- default settings, cache=2048, etc. shows a steady throughput of about 1M
- disabling cache and setting to 0 (zero) drops that throughput down to 250k

2b) 0.10.r383 NetLabs FAT32 install
- default settings, cache=2048, etc. shows a steady throughput of about 3M
- disabling cache and setting to 0 (zero) bumps that throughput up by about 500k to 3.5M
- what is interesting here is that with the cache disabled I am getting sporadic spikes of up to 6-7M, which drop off to about 2M and speed up again

OK, there it is.

Given these results I'm sticking with the Netlabs release, I simply cannot afford to waste time waiting for tens and occasionally hundreds of images to get moved off of my card. 3x the speed difference is just far too large of a gap.

I will say this (being part of the testing group and regularly testing the USB stuff and only intermittently the FAT32 stuff): Gregg put a LOT of effort into making the AOS FAT32 stuff work, so I do not want to take anything away from that and the stability improvements that has brought.

What I described above is a very limitted use-case, that being a fairly small storage card, this certainly pales in comparison to someone who may want to run a multi-Gig drive - I'm thinking the readily available mobile USB drives, and in that situation the AOS may in fact provide the better results. Heck, for all I know, this all may be a moot point when hooking up to a USB3 anyways...I did not test as I have no USB3 interface storage devices here.

I have not tested a from-scratch 'partition/LVM-mark/format/etc.' process either, so this test only covers the accessibility of the device and the throughput rates I'm seeing.

EDIT
====
Added the FAT32 card formatting reference and correct Netlabs r383 driver info.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2020, 05:44:13 am by Dariusz Piatkowski »

Valery Sedletski

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #11 on: March 16, 2021, 10:02:29 pm »
Found this thread a bit late, but I'll answer some points

2Doug Bissett:
> I don't even consider using anything except the AN FAT32 driver. It seems to have a problem, or two, but nothing as bad as what 9.13 has (I don't even remember what the problems were). I did try the other one (with ExFAT, and FAT16, support), but decided that it wasn't really any better, and the FAT16 was interfering with the old OS/2 FAT16 support (not to mention the questionable legality of using it). At the time, I had no need for ExFAT, and still don't. It seems that nobody is using ExFAT anymore, even Microsoft doesn't seem to be pushing it.

How could FAT12/16 support interfere with IBM's FAT support, interestingly? Is not that Lewis Rosenthal who said you that nonsense? (I heard such a statement from him, withou any proof). If you would understand how IFS works, you'd know that only one IFS can mount a partition at a time, so they cannot conflict in any way.  If one IFS has mounted a partition, anoyther one will fail. And you can choose, which IFS should mount a FAT partition. If /fat switch is not specified on fat32.ifs command line, then IBM's kernel driver is in  use. If /fat is specified, then FS is remounted with fat32.ifs.

Regarding the exFAT, it is very useful if you use digital cameras. The SDXC cards are formatted with exFAT by default. So, if you need to copy data from someone else' camera without a reformat, you can use the Netlabs driver. if it's your own camers, you can reformat the card, of course. But no guarantee that the camera will support FAT32. In fact, it shouldn't, as the SDXC spec requires only exFAT support and FAT32 is optional. Also, exFAT supports files bigger than 2 GB. If you use FAT32 on latest cameras, you couldn't be able to copy videos larger than 2 GB, which lasts, with good quality, is about half an hour. So, you decide which FS to use. SDXC spec mandates exFAT support, but FAT32 support is optional. So, you're wrong saying that exFAT is not needed and even MS does not use it.

> (not to mention the questionable legality of using it)
What's the rubbish is that? Why it's not legal? Because AN fears Microsoft? There are several exFAT drivers for Linux. Nobody proved so far that they are illegal, the same for our driver.

2Rich Walsh: The BASEDEV is optional feature. QEMUIMG.DLL is optional too. You can delete it if you wish. The BASEDEV was created to be able to mount disk images with FS other than FAT/FAT32/exFAT. For example, ISO9660/CDFS works fine. Originally, I created support for mounting a FAT/FAT32/exFAT images to a subdirectory on FAT/FAT32/exFAT serving as a mountpoint. This is done by fat32.ifs itself as OS/2 cannot mount a FS to a subdirectory (only to a drive letter). Later, I created a BASEDEV for mouning other FS'es at a drive letter. The cachef32.exe daemon runs a thread which loads a QEMUIMG.DLL, monitors the IFS with FSCTL for open/read/write/close commands, and executes these requests via QEMUIMG.DLL. For a BASEDEV, I just decided to create a second similar thread monitoring the BASEDEV with IOCTL's. They are similar, so, both were put into cachef32.exe. Of course, it is possible to create a separate small daemon, but I just decided to use cachef32.exe to run worker threads. At least, fat32.ifs and cachef32.exe are present in any system, so no need to run more daemons if you need a loopback device support. So, I don't see a problem with this.

Regarding software patents and other rubbish. exFAT and FAT12/16 support is not more patented than FAT32. So, if M$ didn't sued us for using FAT32, then we could sleep in peace with FAT and exFAT as well. Specially for AN, I did created a version without exFAT support with all exFAT code ifdef'ed. So, if you fear M$ so much you could compile it without exFAT support at zero effort. No need to fork the IFS. But you forked it, not me. If someone wants a crippled version without disk image support as well -- no problem, I could #ifdef that too, if needed. Or I can create disk image support as a standalone package, as a compilation option. Unfortunately, I see almost no feedback, so no wonder.

Regarding not having performance improvements. This is indeed planned in the future, but there are some problems on the way. fat32.ifs is a 16-bit driver and has problems with bigger cache sizes. It's good that AN repaired (almost) the cache code. In my latest versions, I even backported the AN changes. But that code is still buggy so it's disabled so far. Also, my version is made sector-size independent. I successfully tested 2048-byte sectors on CDRW's formatted with FAT/FAT32/exFAT. But the cache code has 512-byte sectors hardcoded, that's another problem. I'd like to support other sector sizes in the cache as well. But then, caches with size bigger than 2048 KB, is required. But for that, I probably, need to wait until I convert the IFS to a 32-bit version (this is planned, and not only because of cache, it's also because 64-bit seek required for large files support is not working on 16-bit IFS-es, so I need to port it to 32 bits anyway. I also plan to port fat32.ifs to osFree in the future, so this is another reason to create a 32-bit IFS. I'd probably find a way to create a 16-bit or 32-bit version via an #ifdef).

PS: disk image/loopback support is still unfinished alpha-quality feature. I'd like some feedback regarding the image mounting feature and exFAT, but none so far. I am not aware of someone using these features, except myself.
« Last Edit: March 16, 2021, 11:30:27 pm by Valery Sedletski »

Remy

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #12 on: March 16, 2021, 11:40:11 pm »
I use the latest FAT32 from Netlabs.
For once, I don't have AN.
The other reason was, that I can finally format a dump partition up to 4 GB with FAT16 (by selecting a 64k cluster size) which allows to use the original OS2DUMP (that only dumps to FAT16 partitions) without the need to install DUMPFS.
There are also commandline switches that control what FAT16 partitions are served by FAT32 and which are controlled by the kernel built-in FAT16,you just have to use them.
The latest version is stable and works fine for me. The latest version is newer than the one announced on the Netlabs WIKI.

Hi Lars,

No issue with External SSD using 64k cluster size instead of 4k ?

Regards

Doug Bissett

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #13 on: March 17, 2021, 02:25:08 am »
Quote
How could FAT12/16 support interfere with IBM's FAT support, interestingly? Is not that Lewis Rosenthal who said you that nonsense?

No, I didn't hear it from Lewis. In fact I probably told him about it. This was early in the life of that driver, so things may have been fixed.

Quote
Regarding the exFAT, it is very useful if you use digital cameras.

Perhaps, if you have an older camera. I haven't seen exFAT in anything that I ever bought, and looking at the information on the net, it seems that most companies have decided that it just isn't worth paying Microsoft for the rights to use it. True, it is available, but nobody trusts Microsoft.

Quote
What's the rubbish is that? Why it's not legal? Because AN fears Microsoft? There are several exFAT drivers for Linux. Nobody proved so far that they are illegal, the same for our driver.

Quote
Regarding software patents and other rubbish. exFAT and FAT12/16 support is not more patented than FAT32. So, if M$ didn't sued us for using FAT32, then we could sleep in peace with FAT and exFAT as well.

It is not legal to use FAT32, without paying Microsoft for the right to use it (even if it is only a dollar). They own the patent (as they do with exFAT). Just because they haven't, yet, gone after somebody for using it without the legal paperwork being done, doesn't mean they won't, in the future. IBM trusted Microsoft, and look what happened to OS/2. AN quite rightly fears Microsoft, and they fear IBM too. Their contract with IBM probably prohibits using things like exFAT. If either company decided that AN broke any contracts, they could put AN out of business with the stroke of a pen. AN cannot take the chance. They are a US company, and must follow US law. Obviously, you don't care much for laws, but they are necessary, even if they are stupid. AN do supply the FAT32 driver, which is old enough that they are pretty safe. I do know that they spent a lot of money checking out the legality of many parts of OS/2. That is one of the reasons why some of the GENMAC drivers are not included with ArcaOS. They couldn't get permission to include them.

The bottom line is that you can do what you want. Arca Noae cannot take the chance. If people want to use your driver, that is fine too. Just don't put AN at risk because you think you are above the law.

Quote
The other reason was, that I can finally format a dump partition up to 4 GB with FAT16 (by selecting a 64k cluster size) which allows to use the original OS2DUMP (that only dumps to FAT16 partitions) without the need to install DUMPFS.

Well, DUMPFS is actually the FAT 16 driver, with a patch. You should also realize that ArcaOS 6.0 has new dump support. It will dump to FAT32 (or FAT16 if 2 GB is enough). It doesn't make much sense to make the dump partition more than 4 GB, because that is the largest size that a dump can be. Don't try to use the dump partition for anything else. The dump program doesn't care if you already have something in the drive.

Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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Re: FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?
« Reply #14 on: March 17, 2021, 10:11:01 am »
It is not legal to use FAT32, without paying Microsoft for the right to use it (even if it is only a dollar).

Yes it is, they ran out years ago or were invalidated with the exception of the long filename patent that was invalidated everywhere except for the USA, and is easily circumvented anyway.

exFAT is another issue.