After failing to copy a file bigger than 4G to my 8G USB flash drive, I formatted it as ext3. While this is working fine for me so far, it will cause problems if I want to use it to copy files to someone which does not use Linux.

I am thinking of formatting it as UDF instead, which I hope would allow it to be read (and possibly even written) on the three most popular operating systems (Windows, MacOS, and Linux), without having to install any extra drivers. However, from what I found on the web already, there seem to be several small gotchas related to which parameters are used to create the filesystem, which can reduce the compability (but most of the pages I found are about optical media, not USB flash drives).

I would like to know:

• Which utility should I use to create the filesystem? (So far I have found mkudffs and genisoimage, and mkudffs seems the best option.)
• Which parameters should I use with the chosen utility for maximum compability?
• How compatible with the most common versions of these three operating systems UDF actually is?
• Is using UDF actually the best idea? Is there another filesystem which would have better compatibility, with no problematic restrictions like the FAT32 4G file size limit, and without having to install special drivers in every single computer which touches it?