Opening Sailfish OS HW Adaptation Source Code for Sony Xperia™ X | Jolla Blog

Opening Sailfish OS HW Adaptation Source Code for Sony Xperia™ X

• 
  wvh on September 21, 2017 at 3:33 pm

  The Xperia X supports the SDXC standard, so it should theoretically have a limit of 2TB – although I haven’t seen MicroSDXC cards larger than 400GB. Since Sailfish doesn’t boot from this card, you can format it with any Sailfish/Linux supported file system (at least ext4 and Btrfs) and it should support up to whatever the limit of that file system is.

  A 64GB card with Btrfs (raw partition) file system works fine on my Jolla 1.

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• 
  James Noori on September 22, 2017 at 10:39 am

  This follows the Jolla Tablet actually. Anything larger than 32GB should be formatted to ext4 in order to work with Sailfish OS.

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  • 
    ossi1967 on September 22, 2017 at 10:53 am

    … because Jolla betrayed their community with regards to SDXC support.

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    • 
      James Noori on September 22, 2017 at 10:56 am

      That is not entirely accurate as it was our community that insisted we should not pay any money to a “certain company” in order to have the license for SDXC compatibility. And frankly, it would cost a lot. So I apologise if you feel that way but I can’t agree that it was considered a “betrayal” of any sort.

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      • 
        ossi1967 on September 22, 2017 at 11:31 am

        @James Noori: That’s a myth deliberately created by certain Jolla executives (or one of them?) at the time.

        Actually there was one single individual who opposed SDXC passionately in public. A topic on TJC on this issue was then (ab)used as a poll. The sum of upvotes for all solutions in favor of SDXC (including, for example, making SDXC support an optional, even paid download) exceeded those for “solutions” without SDXC. So “the community” (whoever that is – that’s a different question) wanted SDXC.

        Besides, all of this (both the poll and this one individual’s crusade) were already pointless when they started: SDXC support was a stretch goal at the IGG campaign. While the few who opposed SDXC only did so by clicking an arrow symbol, the others who wanted SDXC compatibility voted for that with their money. So while you’re 100% right when you say “it would cost a lot”, you’d better not say it to those who actually paid for it in 2014 and didn’t get it.

        See, my assumption is that the feature was cancelled because Jolla was already running out of money and didn’t want to pay additional license fees. that’s perfectly acceptable and would have been fine if communicated thatw ay. However, pretending that you were “listening to the community” and turning this in some kind of cheesy anti-Microsoft-stunt is fraud and betrayal.

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        • 
          wvh on September 22, 2017 at 1:35 pm

          But is it a problem for you to format the card with ext4 or btrfs? How often do you switch cards between devices anyway?

          Anyway, if the hardware supports HDXC it should allow up to 2TB of storage. I don’t know what the reason for that limit is – perhaps addressing?

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          • 
            ossi1967 on September 22, 2017 at 3:23 pm

            @wvh The problem is that they betrayed us. I assume that every single person who paid for the feature knows exactly what they need it for (as do I) and that it’s not necessary to doubt that. People wanted it so badly they donated money to have it done.

            Of course using the SD card as a means of data exchange between either 2 mobile devices or a mobile device and a laptop/desktop PC is one of its main use cases. At least for me.

            The main issue though is that whenever you format an SD card, it’ difficult to align the physical sectors of the card and the logical ones of the file system the way the factory does. This means that depending on what you do, either speed or lifetime or both will decrease. You can only be sure you get what you paid for if you take the card out of the box and use it as is… Which is not possible with Jolla devices.

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            • 
              Dave999 on September 22, 2017 at 9:30 pm

              Betrayed us? Haha. Didn’t you say you have no rights when it comes to crowded funding last three year. Betrayed. That’s a good one man!

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              • 
                ossi1967 on September 25, 2017 at 11:04 am

                @Dave999 Maybe you drink a mug of hot chocolate and then re-read what I wrote. The betrayal wasn’t that they couldn’t deliver what we had invested in.

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                • 
                  Dave999 on September 25, 2017 at 9:07 pm

                  So they betrayed us all becouse of something you need/want? Please tell me more.

                • 
                  ossi1967 on September 26, 2017 at 10:39 am

                  @Dave999 Above I’ve said everything there is to say. There’s no need to hold any further friendly conversation with people like you.

            • 
              DrYak on September 26, 2017 at 2:28 pm

              There’s no electronic/signal/etc. difference between SDXC and SDHC cards.
              They all talk the same language to the smartphone (unlike SD cards which use a slightly older protocol. Similar to LBA and LBA48 protocols with harddisks).

              You can plug a SDXC card into a SDHC device.

              The distinction is purely a marketing one.
              Cards called “SDXC” are 64GiB or bigger and are pre-formatted with exFAT (whereas “SDHC” moniker is used for cards up to 32GiB and pre-formatted with FAT32).
              exFAT is heavily patent encumbered (by microsoft) and costs a big chunk of money.
              The simplest way is to do what lots of other company do and call the device “SDHC (can support > 32GB cards if re-formatted)”.

              The alternative way is to live in a country that does not have software patents, and to install the exFAT Fuse driver. Then you can even use your card out-of-the-box, as-is. Entirely possible, thanks to openrepos.net (so you can enjoy your data being eaten by the shitty file system).

              Regarding the erase-block alignment:

              – It’s NOT THAT DIFFICULT, there are tons of tutorials online.

              – This is a problem that is *very* specific to how FAT-based systems (like exFAT and FAT32) (basically, you need to put the FAT in a separate erase block, and to align the clusters boundary with an erase block, other wise the read-modify-write cycles explode).

              – ext4 is very little affected by this (as long as the whole partition it self is aligned to an erase block boundary, which all “well aligned” exFAT cards are already)

              – copy-on-write and log-structured filesystems like BTRFS and UDF are even less affected (they never overwrite, they only append new data, or garbage collect old versions. Due to this, read-modify-write cycles nearly never happen.)

              TL;DR: if you format your SDXC card to btrfs without much though, you’re still safe.

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              • 
                ossi1967 on September 26, 2017 at 3:04 pm

                @DrYak Thanks for your knowledgeable input. Of course we don’t disagree on the facts. It’s just that I wouldn’t call something “not that difficult” if it has triggered all those how-to articles online. For things that aren’t difficult, there’s no how-to. (Also, I’m quite sure Jolla-users who re-format a card with FAT32 don’t even know about the issue, thus don’t search for these tutorials…). Ext4 is fine for a built-in device, but as long as neither my digital camera nor my workmate’s laptop can read/write it, it’s not useful as a file system on an SD card. Same goes for Btrfs with the additional problems that each and every Jolla 1 user has experienced with this file system. So in every day life, Ext4 and Btrfs are not a likely or useful choice. Most people will have to rely on something FAT. Which means for those people, we’re back to “Sorry, you really should have read that tutorial before re-formating the card, which of course means somebody should have told you there is something to be aware of at all”.

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        • 
          hubat on September 24, 2017 at 3:49 pm

          I cannot recall that I have voted in any way back then. But I recall feeling a big uneasiness when I payed for two tablets and two phones driving things towards a stretch goal that I couldn’t justify. I was very, VERY happy with the decision made to drop that stretch goal (which i think happened before it was reached). I believe I have been part of the silent majority that didn’t want money being allocated to that small’n’squashy company. If there was only one voice heard (but I recall a huge outcry, really) it certainly represented me and many others as well.

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          • 
            ossi1967 on September 25, 2017 at 11:22 am

            @hubat: No, this decision was made long after the stretch goal had been reached. That exactly was the problem. (Otherwise people wouldn’t have been so pissed.)

            If you’re happy with the decision, I’m glad for you. I like to have happy people around me.
            But let me repeat that the silent majority was in favor of the SDXC support. It was only a few very vocal anti-MS folks who managed to force their will upon others because Jolla abused the situation in order to save money. The unfortunate consequence being that the use of SD cards is much more difficult now than it should be and we see quite a few reports from users whose SD cards died after a relatively short period of usage.

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        • 
          James Noori on September 25, 2017 at 4:20 pm

          Okay I can’t comment on many of the claims you are making unfortunately as I was not employed by Jolla back then and don’t have the time to dig any information at the moment. But as I recall being a community member close(er) to Jolla, the “main” reason was not that Jolla was in a troubled financial situation. Although that has definitely contributed as a factor, it isn’t the main reason. Therefore I can’t call it a “betrayal” myself. You of course are free to call it exactly what you want to call it!

          And since then, hopefully you have noticed an improved communication (which is still being improved…) which results a great long time reputation from Jolla to the community.

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          • 
            ossi1967 on September 25, 2017 at 4:46 pm

            @James Noori:
            > Therefore I can’t call it a
            > “betrayal” myself. You of
            > course are free to call it
            > exactly what you want to
            > call it!

            Sounds like a good deal to me.

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    • 
      onion on September 24, 2017 at 2:39 pm

      I voted for no-money-to-m$ so I’m happy with the result.

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  • 
    Sthocs on September 22, 2017 at 2:39 pm

    That’s not true actually. Microsoft artificially put this limit to earn royalties with exFAT, but any SD card up to 2TB can be formatted in VFAT.
    That’s what I did with my 64GB card and that’s what Sailfish should propose by default in the built-in format utility. This way, non-techie people could switch it between Sailfish and Windows easily.

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