kernel: FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 13:23 +0100, Richard Downer wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Running Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary.
> 
> I have an external USB hard drive, which contains 2 FAT partitions. 
> When I plug it in, it is detected, and the computer does the necessary
> magic to mount the partitions, and GNOME puts up icons and explorer
> windows for the two FAT partitions.
> 
> However I noticed these error messages in syslog:
> 
> Jun  5 12:01:57 localhost kernel: FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO
> charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!
> Jun  5 12:01:58 localhost kernel: FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO
> charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!
> 
> Checking with mount, I see that both partitions have these mount options:
> 
> type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,quiet,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=077,iocharset=utf8)
> 
> Sure enough, there is something funny happening with these partitions
> related to case sensitivity (in particular, rsync seemed to get quite
> confused when I copied lots of files from a CD-ROM to one of the
> partitions.)
> 
> Searching Ubuntu Bugzilla for the "utf8 is not a recommended IO
> charset" part of the error message reveals nothing....so has anybody
> else seen this problem, or is it just me? :-(
> How can I override the iocharset used to mount these partitions?
> 
> -- 
> rd.
> 
That's normal.  FAT is not a case-sensitive file-system (meaning that
"FILe" and "fiLe" are the same and could not exists in the same
directory).  However, using UTF-8 will make it case sensitive (I don't
know why!) which produce these errors messages in your log.

Why use UTF-8 in FAT file-systems?  Because it's the only (reasonable)
way to support file names in other languages (that's, other than
English).

You shouldn't worry about it too much.  I get these errors in my logs
when I mount FAT partitions.
Ziyad.