Hi Pavel, > You already know that it breaks XP and older linuxes. So... what are > you arguing about?! Chkdsk marks it as invalid filesystem... not a > vfat. no, wrong on all 3 counts. For the "breaks XP", see my previous message where I point out that I have never been able to crash XP with this patch, only with other varients on the patch that reduce the number of random bits we use. The "breaks older linuxes" claim is also wrong. The patch I have posted works fine with all older versions of the Linux kernel that I have tested. If you know of a old version of the Linux kernel that doesn't work with a filesystem written when this patch is enabled then please let me know. I think you may be getting confused by the discussion I had with Eric where I explained about the reasons for the change in fat/dir.c. I won't repeat that long discussion again here, but please re-read the reply I sent to Eric and if you still have questions about it then please ask. Finally, saying that "chkdsk marks it as an invalid filesystem" is not correct. It only complains if there happens (with a very low probability!) to be two files with the same 11 bytes in their respective 8.3 entries. When it complains it renames one of the two files. That rename would not in itself be a problem at all, as changing the 8.3 entry would not affect the long filename, except that chkdsk has a bug where it doesn't follow the Microsoft FAT specification. When you rename a file on a FAT filesystem you are supposed to also update the 8 bit checksum field in the corresponding long filename entries. If you don't do that update then you effectively strip off the long filename. Current versions of Microsoft chkdsk neglect to update the long filename checksum when renaming after detecting a duplicate 8.3 entry. So it is Microsoft's chkdsk, not the patched Linux kernel, that is in violation of the FAT spec. Luckily the probability of this bug cropping up is quite small in practice. Cheers, Tridge -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
