The programs are now portable to non-Linux operating systems. To that end, the build system has been converted to use autotools. There have been Linux specifics in a lot of places which have been either eliminated or should have equivalents so that it should now work in other Unix-like environments. It has been tested on FreeBSD and OS X.
As part of making it portable all the code that assumed 8 bit major/minor numbers – and in fact masked out all other bits – has been cleaned up. Now mkfs.vfat should not misidentify devices anymore and require the -I option to override. The new device probing uses libudev (if available) to collect more information.
Fixed data corruption errors in fsck.fat: Writing to the third to last cluster on FAT12 with an odd number of clusters would corrupt the following cluster. In mkfs.fat, long existing bugs in bad cluster marking (from scanning or user supplied bad blocks list) were fixed so that it actually marks the correct clusters.
The automatic alignment of data clusters that was added in 3.0.8 and broken for FAT32 starting with 3.0.20 has been reinstated. If you need to create file systems for finicky devices that have broken FAT implementations use the option -a to disable alignment.