When it comes to hardware support, we often find ourselves confronted with statements that such-and-such a piece of hardware can’t be used to its full capability under linux or feature ‘X’ isn’t supported yet. For a long time, the SD card reader in many recent laptops fell into that category but thanks to the efforts of Pierre Ossman, who managed to reverse engineer the SDHCI standard from trial-and-error and partial documentation, many of us are now able to use that reader. Although I can’t prove it, I feel that the subsequent publishing of the ‘simplified’ spec (without the DRM bits that we don’t care about) by the SD Association was provoked by his efforts (Why bother hiding it now?) Thanks to those specs, Pierre was able to polish the driver up even more and support a wider range of implementations (of course, there are some that are so out there that even having the SDHCI spec isn’t enough to get them working).
Now, one of the interesting things to fallout of Pierre’s work was that you could use MMC cards in these readers. SD is a fork of MMC and due to the nature of how the hardware works, it is essentially impossible to build a reader that can read SD but not read MMC (the key differences are at the protocol level). So, you ask, why doesn’t the windows driver support MMC cards in the drive? and why can’t my laptop’s BIOS boot from an MMC card in the drive? Well, I can’t speak for their exact motivations but the unquestionable part is that it requires *effort* to not support MMC. The conspiracy theorist may observe that both Microsoft and my laptop’s manufacturer (Toshiba) are both SD backers.
So, if you want to get the most out of your SDHCI reader, you’ve better be running Linux.
And to reinforce that point even further, my changes to support mmc 4.0/4.1 cards were accepted into the Linux kernel and will be present in 2.6.20. w00t! Thanks again to Pierre, wearing his hat as the new MMC subsystem maintainer. So now, not only will that same old SDHCI reader support MMC cards in Linux, it’ll be able to read and write to mmc 4 cards as fast as the hardware allows. And that’s pretty fast. On my laptop it’s a 4-fold increase. If we ever see an 8-bit wide SDHCI 2.0 controller, we’ll be able to make that even faster.
My next goal, and Pierre might beat me to it, is to add support for the new high capacity MMC and SD cards. The original standard uses byte-level addressing, which limits addressable capacity to 4GB – the new revisions (SD 2.0 and MMC 4.2) use block level addressing to access 2TB. Interestingly, the first generation of block addressable cards are 4GB in size – which seems slightly pointless as it introduces incompatibility without gaining anything. Anyway.
The SD literature on these cards (branded SDHC for SD High Capacity) says that they are not compatible with existing readers. While this is true for any reader with a fixed firmware (like most USB readers) and almost certainly true for poor Windows users, it will not stay true for Linux users with SDHCI or other direct-connected controllers – once we get support into the MMC subsystem, you’ll be able to stick these new cards into your existing reader and use them just as well as the old ones.
So, while there are times when using Linux means missing out on some capabilities of your hardware, there are others when it’s the only way to use it to its full potential. Now that’s pretty cool.
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