Handbooklet: exFAT: availability and licencing

grahamperrin · May 22, 2025, 2:15am

Availability

Currently at https://nomadbsd.org/handbook/handbook.html#exfat:

… sysutils/fusefs-exfat

The port has a new category, and a different name:

filesystems/exfat

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=283881 (2025-01-06) was originally entitled “Update documentation/ and website/ following moves of 142 ports to the filesystems category”.

You have to build it …

I suspect not. 1.4.0_1 is packaged:

https://www.freshports.org/filesystems/exfat/#packages

Licencing

… requires a license from Microsoft®, and so it can’t be pre-installed. …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT#Legal_status, interesting.

michel93000 · September 11, 2025, 1:57pm

Hi,

they said that there is exfat for bsd and other unix. But with or not license from microsoft. We don’t know.

List of implementations

A FUSE-based implementation named fuse-exfat, or exfat-fuse,^[4] with read/write support is available for FreeBSD, multiple Linux distributions, and older versions of Mac OS X. It supports TRIM.^[55]^[56]^[57]^[58]^[59] An implementation called exFATFileSystem, based on fuse-exfat, is available for AmigaOS 4.1.^[60]

there is a free version for FreeBSD at

github.com/relan/exfat

README.md

master

About
-----

This project aims to provide a full-featured [exFAT][1] file system implementation for Unix-like systems. It consists of a [FUSE][2] module (fuse-exfat) and a set of utilities (exfat-utils).

Supported operating systems:

* GNU/Linux
* Mac OS X 10.5 or later
* FreeBSD

Most GNU/Linux distributions already have fuse-exfat and exfat-utils in their repositories, so you can just install and use them. The next chapter describes how to compile them from source.

Compiling
---------

To build this project on GNU/Linux you need to install the following packages:

* [git][4]
* [autoconf][5]

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This version is under gnu license GPL version 2 . It’s not proprietary software.

Michel