Thread: Maemo or Android (not a contest of which is better.. pls read)
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retsaw is offline retsaw
2010-10-16 , 21:45
Posts: 701 | Thanked: 585 times | Joined on Sep 2010 @ London, England
#61
Originally Posted by sjgadsby View Post
In fact, being Linux-based, Maemo devices will work with cards larger than 32 GB as well, at least, after a fashion. Maemo devices will not support the Microsoft-patented filesystem that ships on, and is built into the official standard for, those cards. There's a for-pay, closed source, binary blob needed for the filesystem, and we don't have it. But should you reformat such a card with a Maemo-friendly filesystem, you'll be able to use it just fine.
The binary blob isn't necessary, there is a read-only kernel driver for exFAT and a read-write FUSE driver for exFAT, though the FUSE drive is beta software, however since Maemo already has FUSE support, and FUSE drivers are userspace (not part of the linux kernel), it should be trivial to get the FUSE driver working on the N900 should we need it.

Originally Posted by SkyKnight View Post
Thanks for clarifying.. Though i am not sure what for-pay, closed source, binary blob is.... I think i understood the rest of it. If the memory card is formatted in a file system that maemo recognises, it will read it.. right? Just like a pc does? no size limitation...
The "for-pay, closed source, binary blob", is a proprietary driver we don't have the source code for and we need to pay to use it. But as I just mentioned that isn't the only option for exFAT support.

To further clarify, the SDHC spec only supports cards up to 32GB, the SDXC spec supports cards up to 2TB, but it also specifies the filesystem to use to be exFAT. In theory, there should be no problem with them on Linux with current card readers, but the only SDXC cards available are full-size (not MicroSD size like the N900 uses) and quite expensive and I'm not aware of anyone actually confirming this, the only issue should be exFAT support, which is where you might want to format the card to use a different filesystem, but it is likely you'll also have the option of just installing exFAT support.
 

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