Comments on: The Linux kernel needs a case sensitive filesystem

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:32:43 +0000

windhoof @10: I’m not aware of any way to do that succesfully

By: windoof

windoof — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:42:54 +0000

Ok, I see, but still not clarified for me is, _how_ do I checkout the Linux kernel source correctly, if working under e.g. Windows, then?

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:49:49 +0000

chithanh @8: That’s a bit slippery, actually. POSIX specifies that the OS needs to support case sensititive filesystems but it doesn’t actually mandate that all filesystems supported actually implement this, which is what went wrong on OS X. Obvious exceptions on most POSIX systems include FAT and ISO9660 derived filesystems.

By: chithanh

chithanh — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:23:59 +0000

Note that POSIX mandates case sensitive file naming.
NTFS is case sensitive, ie. it is valid to have readme.txt, Readme.txt, and README.TXT in the same directory. Just Win32 is specified to be case insensitive.

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Juhapekka @6: Right, this refers to the sources rather than the kernel itself (and in fact filesystems can always implement whatever behaviour, though native ones are unlikely to). I’ll edit the post slightly to clarify.

By: Juhapekka Tolvanen

Juhapekka Tolvanen — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:33:09 +0000

Filesystems of Linux ARE case-sensitive. Filesystems of Windows are case-preserving. FAT of MS-DOS is case-insensitive filesystem.

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:24:26 +0000

Israel @3: The issue is if you’re trying to work with the Linux source on a platform other than Linux – the most common example of this is trying to do embedded Linux development.

By: Sven

Sven — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:19:38 +0000

One of the next kernel releases with the new xfs code will have this, IMHO, braindead feature. Only because Windows or DOS I guess has a design error not everyone should adopt that error. Or maybe we should even get to 5+3 character names back …

By: Israel Miranda

Israel Miranda — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:50:14 +0000

But, why Linux needs a case sensitive filesystem if it already has one ?

By: Harry8

Harry8 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:04:17 +0000

Or from people using OSX with HFS+