Re: [PATCH 1/4] exfat: Simplify exfat_utf8_d_hash() for code points above U+FFFF

From: Pali RohÃr
Date: Mon Apr 13 2020 - 06:10:13 EST


On Monday 13 April 2020 08:13:45 Kohada.Tetsuhiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > On Wednesday 08 April 2020 03:59:06 Kohada.Tetsuhiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > > > So partial_name_hash() like I used it in this patch series is enough?
> > >
> > > I think partial_name_hash() is enough for 8/16/21bit characters.
> >
> > Great!
> >
> > Al, could you please take this patch series?
>
> I think it's good.
>
>
> > > Another point about the discrimination of 21bit characters:
> > > I think that checking in exfat_toupper () can be more simplified.
> > >
> > > ex: return a < PLANE_SIZE && sbi->vol_utbl[a] ? sbi->vol_utbl[a] : a;
> >
> > I was thinking about it, but it needs more refactoring. Currently
> > exfat_toupper() is used on other places for UTF-16 (u16 array) and therefore it cannot be extended to take more then 16
> > bit value.
>
> Iâm also a little worried that exfat_toupper() is designed for only utf16.
> Currently, it is converting from utf8 to utf32 in some places, and from utf8 to utf16 in others.
> Another way would be to unify to utf16.
>
> > But I agree that this is another step which can be improved.
>
> Yes.

There are two problems with it:

We do not know how code points above U+FFFF could be converted to upper
case. Basically from exfat specification can be deduced it only for
U+0000 .. U+FFFF code points. We asked if we can get answer from MS, but
I have not received any response yet.

Second problem is that all MS filesystems (vfat, ntfs and exfat) do not
use UCS-2 nor UTF-16, but rather some mix between it. Basically any
sequence of 16bit values (except those :/<>... vfat chars) is valid,
even unpaired surrogate half. So surrogate pair (two 16bit values)
represents one unicode code point (as in UTF-16), but one unpaired
surrogate half is also valid and represent (invalid) unicode code point
of its value. In unicode are not defined code points for values of
single / half surrogate.

Therefore if we talk about encoding UTF-16 vs UTF-32 we first need to
fix a way how to handle those non-representative values in VFS encoding
(iocharset=) as UTF-8 is not able to represent it too. One option is to
extend UTF-8 to WTF-8 encoding [1] (yes, this is a real and make sense!)
and then ideally change exfat_toupper() to UTF-32 without restriction
for surrogate pairs values.

Btw, same problem with UTF-16 also in vfat, ntfs and also in iso/joliet
kernel drivers.

[1] - https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/