Re: [PATCH v9 10/13] exfat: add nls operations

[Gabriel Krisman Bertazi]

Pali RohÃr <pali.rohar@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> What do you think what should kernel's exfat driver do in this case?
>
> To prevent such thing we need to use some kind of Unicode normalization
> form here.
>
> CCing Gabriel as he was implementing some Unicode normalization for ext4
> driver and maybe should bring some light to new exfat driver too.

We have an in-kernel implementation of the canonical decomposition
normalization (NFD) in fs/unicode, which is what we use for f2fs and
ext4.  It is heated argument what is the best form for filesystem usage,
and from what I researched, every proprietary filesystem does a
different (and crazy in their unique way) thing.

For exfat, even though the specification is quite liberal, I think the
reasonable answer is to follow closely whatever behavior the Windows
implementation has, whether it does normalization at all or not. Even if
it is just an in-memory format used internally for lookups, assuming a
different format or treating differently invalid file names can result
in awkward results in a filesystem created on another operating system,
like filename collisions or false misses in lookups.

-- 
Gabriel Krisman Bertazi