After doing a little research into the state of Secure Digital card drivers under Linux, and in particular the state of SDIO cards I’m getting increasingly concerned. To get started here’s a quote from the Wikipedia article on “Secure Digital card”
So it’s possible that GPH has a licensing agreement with Secure Digital Card Association that has allowed GPH to write a closed source SD driver for the GPX2’s Linux implementation but it’s also possible that GPH simply resorted to using the SD card’s ability to fall back into MMC mode. Either way the community getting SDIO cards working in my mind seems like a long shot since the Open Source community as a whole apparently hasn’t had much luck with that. GPH has already seemed to say that they aren’t working on getting SDIO working. Given what I think I understand about the nature of SD it would seem that our only hope for getting SDIO working would be through GPH since only they would have the access to the necessary documentation (if they have even licensed SD) to write an SDIO driver. I have the distinct hunch that SD support on the GP2X is going to be completely done through MMC fall back and thus slow as mud, and no hope for SDIO devices.
Any reason I should think I'm wrong on this?
"Wikipedia" said:Like most memory card formats, SD is covered by numerous patents and trademarks, and licensing is only available through the Secure Digital Card Association. The SD Card Association’s current licensing agreement does not allow for open-source SD drivers, a fact that generates a fair amount of consternation in the open-source and free software communities. The usual workaround is to develop an open-source wrapper for a closed-source SD driver available on the particular platform, but this is far from ideal. Another common workaround is to use the older MMC mode, which all SD cards are required to support by the SD standard.
So it’s possible that GPH has a licensing agreement with Secure Digital Card Association that has allowed GPH to write a closed source SD driver for the GPX2’s Linux implementation but it’s also possible that GPH simply resorted to using the SD card’s ability to fall back into MMC mode. Either way the community getting SDIO cards working in my mind seems like a long shot since the Open Source community as a whole apparently hasn’t had much luck with that. GPH has already seemed to say that they aren’t working on getting SDIO working. Given what I think I understand about the nature of SD it would seem that our only hope for getting SDIO working would be through GPH since only they would have the access to the necessary documentation (if they have even licensed SD) to write an SDIO driver. I have the distinct hunch that SD support on the GP2X is going to be completely done through MMC fall back and thus slow as mud, and no hope for SDIO devices.
Any reason I should think I'm wrong on this?
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