Exfat

[twelve]

Continuing the discussion from Time for the Buster RC-3 SD image:

@jofemodo

Sorry, this has never been supported. It’s not a flaw. If someone finds a way of configuring the “fuse exfat” driver for automounting an USB disk, i will integrate it. Until then, try to convince M$ to release the patent pending on exfat, so the driver can be included on the linux kernel

I understand your point of view. Convincing the market to move in a different direction is certainly far more suited for people with more bravery and patience than me at the moment

For me, testing only makes sense from a target audience perspective (let’s say, a non technical talent musician using the Zynthian as a musical pocket knife). Let’s say such user just bought a roomy and fast USB disk on the market to store recordings and/or a plethora of custom sound fonts and the disk happens to be formatted as exfat. Reformatting is not really desirable or even possible for this user. The disk may be shared for other purposes and files, etc.

In this case there exits a workaround, but it’s nowhere close to the end-user nor practical:

• plugin usb disk
• From another device able to run ssh connected to the Zynthian:
  ssh -lroot zynthian.local
  mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 /media/usb0/
  exit

(so essentially manualy mounting via an external device).
Technically this works, but is convoluted enough not to be workable in a lot of situations. Certainly not in a live situation, where you’ll most likely will want to use the device to store a recording.

I wrongly assumed that it would be possible to improve on this, given how close to working it already is.

To solve my own problem, I’m considering to chuck that single mount line into some script that will get run at each boot: if the disk is there, a mount will be attempted or else silently fail. Obviously, just tailored to my setup, and I’ll surely regret the customisation one day.

What’s the recommended way to approach this?
A bit of googling suggests some inspiration levering systemd which is used smartly on the zynthian:

Automount USB drives with systemd

Could something like this work/help and not interfere with normal automatic mounting?

Anyway, just an idea. Probably a quick hack on my local image is enough for my own use case.

I really need to stay away from the technical stuff as I’m really more here to produce some sound and I really should treat the Zynthian as the Meta-Synth it is…

Thanks for all the effort you’re putting into all of this!

I have had absolutely great fun with the Zynthian so far, I just have an inclination to want to make it easier to lower the friction for new users

[jofemodo]

Try to copy this file:

usbmount.conf (2.9 KB)

to this directory on the zynthian:

/etc/usbmount

And reboot. If we are lucky, exfat usb drives will work …

Regards,

[twelve]

Hi,
No luck yet, but some progress!

‘mount’ shows me the following extra lines showing the usb drive automatically mounted with type “fuseblk”

/dev/sda1 on /media/usb0 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)

but, the mountpoint is not working:

root@zynthian:~# ls -al /media/usb0
ls: cannot access '/media/usb0': Transport endpoint is not connected

root@zynthian:~# pumount /dev/sda1
root@zynthian:~# mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 /media/usb0/
FUSE exfat 1.3.0
WARN: volume was not unmounted cleanly.
root@zynthian:~# pumount /dev/sda1
root@zynthian:~# mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 /media/usb0/
FUSE exfat 1.3.0
root@zynthian:~# pumount /dev/sda1

(note how unmount and remounting fixes the “unmounted cleanly” flag. But it’s back there after a reboot and the “usbmount” automount attempt)

exfatfsck found 2 “date” errors but refused to fix them, so I put it in a windows pc, which insisted that there was nothing wrong with the drive, ran a fix anyway. This didn’t improve things, but there appears to be nothing wrong with the disk: it works fine when manually (re)mounted.

Any ideas?