causes issues with kernel exfat support in 20.04

[Evan]

I have a main storage partition I use to share data between an Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 installation and a Windows 10 one. Windows has it's own partition, and Ubuntu has one for / and one for /home.

From a fresh install exfat drives and partitions mount without issue. However I recently needed to format a disk in exfat; Gparted doesn't support this but both Gnome Disks and KDE Partition Manager do if the exfat-utils package is installed. So I installed it (via apt) and the dependency exfat-fuse was installed as well and Gnome Disks worked as expected. But when I went to mount the disk it was identified as using the fuse driver (is that the right term?) not the kernel support.

I thought this was a bit weird. I uninstalled exfat-utils and exft-fuse, and then mounting worked as expected again not giving me a message about the fuse version.

To test a bit I installed the packages again this morning, but this time I just kept getting an error about mount failure and I (with my limited knowledge) couldn't mount the drive. This time I only uninstalled exfat-fuse (which is allowed by apt apparently). Now everything is working, I can mount exfat partitions and drives and format them too.

Doing some simple benchmarking the exfat kernel support is as fast as ext4 on the same drive (SSD), so it seems silly that the exfat-fuse would be prioritized over the kernel support. My experience with 18.04 was that exfat-fuse was significantly slower than an ext4 partition, but I cannot at the moment test such on 20.04.

My simple reading of the situation is that exfat-fuse is not a required dependency for exfat-utils on 20.04 as once removed everything still seems to work.

and fyi:
I also asked about this on Ask Ubuntu:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1240408/20-04-and-exfat

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: exfat-fuse (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-29.33-generic 5.4.30
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-29-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: Budgie:GNOME
Date: Sun May 17 16:19:32 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-05-10 (7 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Budgie 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20200423)
SourcePackage: fuse-exfat
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Evan (esklarski)]

On further investigation it seems removing the fuse part is simple enough. The folks at archlinux.org have created an exfat-utils-nofuse package ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/exfat-utils-nofuse/ ) with a simple patch that simply removes the fuse part for exfat-utils ( https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/nofuse.patch?h=exfat-utils-nofuse ).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.