SD card support now available for Pandaboard

Sorry to start yet another SD thread, but none of the others were appropriate!

If you have an OMAP4 Pandaboard or Pandaboard ES, you should hopefully find that tonight’s ROM build will grant you the same SD functionality as OMAP3 and Raspberry Pi owners. Credit for this is mostly due to Willi Theiss.

I’ve been testing it out on the same cards I used for OMAP3 and Rasppberry Pi, and results look good so far. Reliability appears to be good. It easily outperforms the OMAP3, and is only slightly slower than the Raspberry Pi, typically by about 0.2 MB/s. The exception is 8-bit MMC cards, where OMAP4 has a clear lead over the others – the OMAP3 controller just seems to be slower in general, and the Raspberry Pi can only run those cards in 4-bit mode.

One thing to be aware of is that although the Pandaboard uses the same SD receptacle as the Beagleboard, and therefore features a lever to detect the position of the card’s write-protect switch, this is not connected to the OMAP4, so write protect will not work on Pandaboard. There’s nothing we can do about this in software. For the record, the write protect switch is also not connected on Raspberry Pi…

Did I forget … Many thanks. Works very well. Now I can close my case because I no longer have to remove the SD card to replace the ROM.

Agreed, it does work very well (after much faffing around getting the dual partition stuff to work!).

After buying a SanDisk Extreme Pro class 10 SDHC card (according to the outside of the card this is 95MB/s!!! <— not quite sure how true that is though… ;-) ) – OMG it is so fast!

Not entirely what a 8-bit MMC is though – does it have another name?

Raik:

I am curious as to how you can see the ROM as this needs to be in a FAT partition?

Sorry, I’m on the SD card have only the FAT partition. I have built a complete Panda computer (250GB HD; DVDWriter …). That is unfortunately open not easily as the BIK/ARMini.
If you are interested, look at http://home.arcor.de/raik_fischer (Bilder = Pictures). Not enough time, so a little unsorted and not quite up to date.
Unfortunately, I can also see on a partitioned SD card only the ADFS (first) partition.

Wow Raik – that is some case!

I can see why you do not want to fish around in there to do a ROM upgrade :-)

Hopefully we’ll see soon something for the fastest RISC OS computer off the back of Ben’s work on the Raspberry Pi where you can get to the FAT partition via an image file inside !Boot <— very clever and will be an absolute boon to me accross all three of my machines!

Thanks, I’ve had practice;-) The problem is the shelf where the Panda stands. Little space.

Could be, is being considered (if D.T. [a4com] and A.R. [RCOMP] want fast) … this is the ARMaxi (with minor changes), or whatever ;-)

I have a partitioned SD in my current project. Currently FAT will be described with BBFlash.
I still have a hard drive with important files from my A4. 4 partitions via EADFS. The A4 has unfortunately died. I would like to return the data. I hope Ben is successful;-)