Re: [gentoo-user] Re: android and mtp

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2012-12-24, Nilesh Govindrajan <me@nileshgr.com> wrote:
>> On Monday 24 December 2012 09:24:16 AM IST, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>> I'm glad they chose MTP: I want my phone to continue to work while I'm
>>> transferring files.  In order to mount the filesystem via USB, the
>>> phone would have to unmount it (which means it's nothing but a flash
>>> drive).  In order to mount the filesystem via USB, it also means
>>> they'd be forced to use VFAT for the Linux root filesystem, and that
>>> sucks bad.
>>>
>>
>> They still use VFAT for the so called sdcard (my Xperia S has internal
>> storage, not extensible).
>
> That's understandable.  But for phones with only a single flash device
> (like my Nexus Galaxy), using MTP is the only sensical thing to do.
> If you want to access only the SD card, then VFAT and USB mass storage
> works (well, it works as well as VFAT allows).

To a very limited extent. If you have running programs on the phone,
they may very well depend on being able to write to the SD card, and
may crash if the SD card is removed. In Android, there is _no_
internal storage space for application data; only application code. If
an application is supposed to retain data, it needs to be able to put
it on the SD card.

Similarly, it's very common to move user-installed applications from
internal memory to the phone (for many apps, this doesn't require
rooting the phone). This is problematic if the filesystem is yanked
out from under them while they're running.

VFAT is not designed for concurrent access, and should not be used if
MTP can be made to work. MTP is there specifically to allow the
filesystem to be available to multiple consumers...that of the device
and that of the machine the device is plugged into.

--
:wq