[mschuster91]

> Is it really necessary to keep dragging FAT along?

Anything involving embedded and without deep pockets has no other option, FAT (sadly) still is the least common denominator. Some speak ExFAT, but not sure how good the tooling support is outside of Microsoft, and there are still patent concerns.

[loeg]

I believe the exFAT patents expire or expired this year.

[creshal]

Even without patent concerns, exFAT takes more effort to implement (lots of features you might not need) and ends up requiring more ROM space that may or may not be available… even if you want to write files exceeding 4GB to some external media.

e.g. some widget without network connection that optionally logs an audit trail to an attached USB media, could still end up with only a couple hundred kilobytes of soldered-on ROM to store the whole firmware, while wanting to write more than 4GB of audit logs.