ROOL News: Latest news: SD card support comes to RISC OS

SD card support comes to RISC OS

Steve Revill — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 22:26:00 +0100

RISC OS Open and Piccolo Systems are very pleased to announce the release of a general-purpose MMC/SD filing system for RISC OS.

ROOL have signed an agreement with Piccolo Systems to publish the source code to the driver and related software under an Open Source licence within the ROOL CVS repository. It will be integrated into the OMAP3 developer ROM build, found on our downloads pages to give native support for SD cards on the Beagleboard, Beagleboard-xM, DevKit8000 (untested) and IGEPv2 (untested).

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Ben Avison (25)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:54:31 +0100

It does seem to vary a lot depending upon exactly which card you use, but it does affect reads as well as writes. On the plus side, the CRCs used “on the wire” mean that you’re unlikely to get silent corruption of the card – but you may find that writes do not complete successfully, leading to inconsistent data in a file, or if you’re really unlucky, in a directory or the disc map/FAT. Look out for “Disc error 08” or “Disc error 23”, that’s what I’ve been seeing a lot of.

I know a lot of people are keen to use SDFS on the Pi, and this gives you a flavour of it, but I can’t emphasise enough that it’s significantly less stable than the beagleboard version. One reason for sharing it at this point is to see how much of a problem it is for people in general – it’s possible that I have a dodgy board, for example.

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Chris Hall (132)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 19:07:06 +0100

{RPi verion] it is not reliable in its current state

Is the unreliability confimed to writes to the SD card? Can SD card reads corrupt the card?

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Ben Avison (25)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:18:20 +0100

I’ve just uploaded Raspberry Pi support to CVS, so it will be in tonight’s autobuild. But please note that unlike the OMAP3 version, it is not reliable in its current state. The Raspberry Pi seems to be very picky about its SD cards, don’t be surprised if you see a lot of disc errors, especially for larger data transfers.

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Chris Hall (132)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:00:46 +0100

Will it be rolled into the Raspberry Pi build in due course please?

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Trevor Johnson (329)

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:26:31 +0100

Nice work, Piccolo Systems – great that this is an open source release!

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Ben Avison (25)

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:30:05 +0100

As it happens, the screen shot is indeed from a Raspberry Pi – it predates Jeffrey’s recent USB work, which is why there are no other drives shown. I’d like to think the Pi version will be ready for release in that sort of time frame, but I can’t make any promises. As for ROOL’s attendance at the MUG show, I’m afraid I can’t say yet.

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Chris Hall (132)

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 11:30:11 +0100

Does the screen shot on the piccolo web site show SDFS working on a Raspberry Pi?
Will this be released in time for the Midlands User Group show on 7th July 2012 in Kenilworth and will ROOL be there?

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Ben Avison (25)

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:55:03 +0100

Speaking as a corporate entity, we are not amused :)

And yes, Raspberry Pi support was always very much a part of the plan. I expect Pandaboard support won’t be too much further behind, either.

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Steve Revill (20)

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 23:46:42 +0100

RPi support is under development. Mainly ironing-out the last few issues.

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by andym (447)

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 23:09:15 +0100

Would this be incorporated into the RPi port in the near future?

"SD card support comes to RISC OS" by Martin Bazley (331)

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 22:57:20 +0100

Is that the ‘royal we’ on the Piccolo page?