Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line
FAT
USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.
exFAT
Good news: someone addressed that problem. Bad new: that someone is Microsoft. So as you could expect, exFAT, the extended FAT, is a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.
Read more Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks
Booting with UEFI
I have just bought a new motherboard, a ASRock E350M1/USB3 with and embedded AMD E350 processor. I was mostly interested in trying the embedded GPU and the UEFI firmware (UEFI is simply the name of EFI 2).
According to ASRock's marketing, the main benefit of that UEFI is its graphical interface that allows to use the mouse to configure the board. I cannot agree with that, because I think it is perfectly possible to implement that with a BIOS (and I think some BIOSes actually do it), and it is pointless anyway. For me, the main benefits are a faster and cleaner boot (no idea why it should be faster, but it is).