SD controller driver for OpenRISC eCos

Note: If you are unfamiliar with the OpenRISC architecture or just want some help on setting up your OpenRISC work environment, we recommend the great tutorial from our friend Sven-Ake, working for our partner, Realtime Embedded.

This week we are going to deal with SD card support for the OpenRISC eCos port, enabling the developer to have easily replacable, persistent storage for the platform, a welcome addition to any system. SD card support is generally scarce for the OpenRISC so this should be a good reference implementation for SD support on other OSs.

The SD Host controller used in ORPSoC is the sdcard_mass_storage_controller project from OpenCores. We have written a driver for the OpenRISC eCos that connects itself to the disk layer and commited it to the main OpenRISC eCos repository.

Thus it is very easy to configure eCos to support a filesystem on the SD card out of the box. In the Open Source eCos version we can choose between two popular filesystems: jffs2 and FAT.

For example, to prepare an eCos build with the FAT filesystem support, the following lines are necessary:

ecosconfig new orpsoc default
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_DISK
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_FILEIO
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_FS_FAT
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_BLOCK_LIB
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_LINUX_COMPAT

Before compilation it might be a good idea to configure some options, especially the name of the disk device, which defaults to /dev/mmcdisk0.

Once we’re ready, just like in last week’s post, we issue:

ecosconfig tree
make

getting a compiled eCos with SD support. Also here the API is POSIX-compliant, which makes writing programs manipulating filesystems on SD cards easy and straightforward. A good example can be found in: packages/fs/fat/current/tests/fatfs1.c.

Note that in addition to the opencores repository, we’re now mirroring it on our github account for greater availability.