On Mon, 2013-06-10 at 20:03 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
I agree that the FAT driver is not 'free software' and I agree that is a problem for usage with free software projects, such as QEMU. This is a big deal, but unfortunately, as an Intel employee, I think I've done as much as I can to address this.
It couldn't hurt if more people that actually care about this spoke up on edk2-devel about the issue, or perhaps within a UEFI working group. Because, I know that they've stopped listening to me about it.
Is this useful? I can try to make noise. I assume since folks like you who have much more credibility and familiarity in this space have given up, it's a lost cause.
I don't think it's a lost cause. It's not technically hard to implement a FAT driver. And the *bureaucracy* shouldn't be hard either. Distributions ship *lots* of FAT implementations already. The alleged patents on it, if there even *are* any left, are fraudulent. And don't apply in the Free World where I live either, to my knowledge.
If we can ship FAT support in the Linux kernel, in mtools, and in various other things including BSD kernels, then we can damn well ship a UEFI module which implements FAT support. Saying that we can't do the latter, while simultaneously continuing to do the former, makes absolutely no sense.
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David Woodhouse