thunar hangs when opening large USB vfat drives

[Alex Shulgin]

Binary package hint: thunar

Opening vfat drives in thunar (for the first time after the mount) takes significant time, proportional to drive's size: approx. 3 minutes for 320G drive. The file browser displays nothing and just 'hangs' with the status 'Loading folder contents...'.

The problem is caused by the call to statfs which makes the whole disk scan in the absence of 'usefree' option to mount. The same problem also affects nautilus.

For my setup, I've just edited fstab entries for my external drives. However, plugging in large USB sticks still happens with delay (tolerable).

This problem was reported and fixed back in 2007, see e.g. #133567

Now, it might be unwise to add 'usefree' by default when mounting vfat drives. How about adding a special option to 'Removable drives and media' below the 'Mount removable media then inserted'?

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Oct 7 10:40:33 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: thunar 1.0.1-1ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, username)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.39-generic
SourcePackage: thunar
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic x86_64

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

With the gio port, thunar now uses whatever mount flags set by udisks/gdu, so there's no need for a special option in thunar, it can be set up globally for the system in udisks/gdu.