Hi,
I’m not very proficient with the ExFAT file format.
When running Rocky Linux 8, EPEL provides exfatprogs, whereas RPMFusion has exfat-utils and fuse-exfat. I’m a bit confused as to which one I’d rather use. Is one better than the other? Are they mutually exclusive?
Cheers,
Niki
What is it you actually want to do with exfat?
Stuff you do with your average removable disk, I guess. Create an ExFAT filesystem, mount the disk, unmount it, and then read and write files (on the command line and in Dolphine). That pretty much sums it up.
For all intent and purposes exfatprogs and exfat-utils based on comparison of these pages:
https://rhel.pkgs.org/8/rpmfusion-free-updates-x86_64/exfat-utils-1.3.0-3.el8.x86_64.rpm.html
https://rhel.pkgs.org/8/epel-x86_64/exfatprogs-1.2.2-1.el8.x86_64.rpm.html
under the files section, they show pretty much the same content. The same tools for creating, formatting, etc, for exfat partitions.
The fuse-exfat is user-space fuse module to allow exfat partitions to be mounted. It may or may not be needed. If you cannot mount with exfatprogs or exfat-utils installed, then install the fuse-exfat package.
Some people might use EPEL and not RPMFusion, therefore would install exfatprogs. What you will find however is that exfatprogs is version 1.2.2-1 and exfat-utils is 1.3.0-3. So if you want or need the later version, use exfat-utils. Otherwise, there probably isn’t much difference.
You can also from the command line do:
dnf repoquery -l exfatprogs
dnf repoquery -l exfat-utils
to compare the contents, and it would tell you the same mostly as the two links above on what files the packages contain.
Modern kernels (aka the one in RHEL9 and newer) have the exfat kernel module support available.
That’s not the case for the RHEL8 kernel and it wasn’t backported by Red Hat either.
So before having in-kernel exfat support, the way was to use the fuse-exfat and exfat-utils packages for supporting exfat implementation in userspace. It was provided in RPM Fusion over EPEL for the usual patent fear or so.
As RPM Fusion project, we are going to keep theses packages in. But it’s also relevant to move to RHEL9 for desktop or use a newer kernel for Rocky 8:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kwizart/kernel-longterm-5.15/