Raspberry Pi SD card support

Alan Cudmore alan.cudmore at gmail.com
Wed Apr 16 19:06:51 UTC 2014


On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Andre Marques <
andre.lousa.marques at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 04/04/14 20:19, Joel Sherrill wrote:
>
>> On 4/4/2014 1:15 PM, Gedare Bloom wrote:
>>
>>> The license looked fine to me.
>>>
>> +1
>>
>> As always, we just need to be careful on a file per file basis just in
>> case
>> something else in rpi-boot has a different license.
>>
>
> All files in rpi-boot use a similar licence, so I will be using some code
> from rpi-boot as a base for this.


Great.


>
>
>  On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Alan Cudmore <alan.cudmore at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  From my limited research, it looks like the emmc controller in the
>>>> Raspberry
>>>> Pi BCM2835 may be the way to go.
>>>> It looks like it is a high level controller for the SD/MMC card slot on
>>>> the
>>>> Pi.
>>>>
>>>> Since this is a custom controller, I don't think there would be an
>>>> existing
>>>> driver in RTEMS.
>>>>
>>>> It seems that this emmc controller in the Pi may handle different types
>>>> of
>>>> cards, and at a higher level than just using the SPI bus to access the
>>>> card.
>>>> ( This is based on some searches of conversations on the raspberry pi
>>>> forums
>>>> , not my experience )
>>>>
>>>> You would have to write a driver for this emmc controller and provide
>>>> the
>>>> interface to libblock for the file system interface on RTEMS. The code
>>>> you
>>>> have linked above for rpi-boot looks like it has a permissive license,
>>>> so it
>>>> *may* be possible to use this code in the RTEMS driver. There is some
>>>> other
>>>> potentially useful code in there too.
>>>>
>>>
> The mailbox access, mmio read and write and the timer code will also be
> usefull, and not only for emmc. This timer code differs from the
> misc/timer.h currently in the raspberrypi BSP, as it waits a certain amount
> of time (until some register gets updated). The misc/timer.h is a benchmark
> timer, so one of them would have to be renamed or reorganized.
>
>
Can an RTEMS timer be used for the mailbox communication?
Also, I don't think the benchmark timer code in the RTEMS Raspberry Pi BSP
is functional.

I have been contacted by someone who is currently working on a console
driver for the BSP, and has been able to display fonts. We may want to
include him, because I think the graphics code uses mailbox communication
to the GPU.

It is very interesting that the GPU is running a commercial RTOS, and we
will be communicating to it with RTEMS.



> My plan was to have at the root of the raspberrypi BSP a folder "emmc" for
> the emmc driver code, and the mailbox, mmio and timer on the misc folder,
> with the headers on the include folder. What do you think?
>
> I have been trying the rpi-boot emmc code for the past week, and I
> modified the hello test to use the emmc driver (an overly simplified
> version of the rpi-boot, just to read the slot info register for now), and
> my compilation process has been:
>
> 1. Add/change files in Raspberrypi BSP
> 2. Update Makefile.am
> 3. Run bootstrap -p and bootstrap from the RaspberryPi BSP folder
> 4. (Re)configure RTEMS
> 5. make and make install RTEMS from the root folder
>
> That is pretty much what I do. Although it might be possible to test
drivers and code in the RKI image, then integrate it into the RTEMS tree
when it is ready.



> I have been using the --enable-maintainer-mode, but I am not sure about
> exacly what it simplifies, because I always needed to do those steps for it
> to compile and link correctly.
>

I don't know what this does either..


Alan


>
> --André Marques
>
>
>
>>>> I'll have to try the serial bootloader, I am also close to ordering an
>>>> inexpensive JTAG adapter to try loading and debugging through JTAG.
>>>> uboot is
>>>> another possibility, using a TFTP server.
>>>>
>>>> Alan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Andre Marques
>>>> <andre.lousa.marques at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm intending to work in the SD card support for the Raspberry Pi BSP,
>>>>> using the SD mode instead of the SPI mode.
>>>>>
>>>>> The references I have gathered so far for this are as follows:
>>>>>
>>>>> The Raspberry Pi SOC guide: Broadcom BCM2835 Peripherals Guide
>>>>> (Chapter 5
>>>>> - EMMC)
>>>>>
>>>>> The simplified SD standard -
>>>>> https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/pls/simplified_specs/
>>>>>
>>>>> And the following github code -
>>>>> https://github.com/jncronin/rpi-boot/blob/master/emmc.c
>>>>>
>>>>> There is also the libchip/i2c/spi-sd-card libi2c driver, which can
>>>>> also be
>>>>> a reference (even though it uses SPI).
>>>>>
>>>>> Now, the questions:
>>>>>
>>>>> Should I use the Generic Disk Device driver, as the
>>>>> libchip/i2c/spi-sd-card ?
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there any driver using the SD mode for sd card access, or using an
>>>>> emmc
>>>>> interface currently in the RTEMS code base? I haven't found any.
>>>>>
>>>>> On a side note, I managed to send RTEMS applications to the RPi though
>>>>> the
>>>>> UART interface using the xmodem protocol.
>>>>>
>>>>> For that I used the following bootloader
>>>>>
>>>>> https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/bootloader05
>>>>>
>>>>> It takes me 2 minutes to send 1 MB of data to the RPi, but this could
>>>>> be
>>>>> improved if it used 1024 byte block transfer instead of the default of
>>>>> 128.
>>>>> The bootloader loads the transfered program to memory and runs it.
>>>>> Then the
>>>>> RPi must be rebooted so a new program can be sent.
>>>>>
>>>>> It may not be the best way, but only requires an usb-to-uart cable, and
>>>>> avoids the current SD card "dance" to run programs on the Pi.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thank you for your time.
>>>>>
>>>>> --André Marques
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>  _______________________________________________
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>>>>
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>>
>
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