First steps to Wifi released yielding increased SD performance

RISC OS Developments are pleased to announce the release of the first steps towards Wifi on RISC OS – updated SDIO drivers for most platforms making the on-board wifi chips visible/accessible.

This project represents a sizable chunk of work, with updates and improvements to almost all active RISC OS platforms, enhancing the SDIO bus support and allowing improved access to multiple SDIO devices (including SD cards, eMMC and wifi / bluetooth chips).

For those unfamiliar, most ARM SoCs (System-on-chip) have limited external connectivity for high speed devices, so wifi/bluetooth controllers are often connected via the SD card “SDIO” bus already present.

This work opens that bus up, and provides driver developers with Linux and OpenBSD compatibility libraries, so that wifi drivers can be ported and can communicate with the chips via SDIO.

In the process, various improvements have been made to SD support on RISC OS, often improving performance and reliability.

Updated platforms include (but not limited to)…

• Raspberry Pi 0W, 3B/B+
• Secondary SDIO controller enabled allowing for separate SD and wifi bus, and DMA added to improve SD performance.

• Raspberry Pi 4
• Wifi/BT controller now visible via SDIO bus

• iMX6
• Wifi/BT controller now visible via SDIO, and noticable improvements to read performance of both SD slots.

• OMAP4 (Panda)
• Wifi controller now visible via SDIO

• Allwinner A64 (Pine)
• Wifi controller now visible via SDIO, eMMC now accessible, significant (x2) performance increase on SD, edge case stability improvements

All these changes have been submitted for immediate open source release via the community Gitlab hosted by RISC OS Open Ltd. We note that some eager forum members have already begun experimenting with this new code!

RISC OS Developments would like to thank those who helped make this project happen, both in terms of technical expertise/coding and financial support. We look forward to more such projects in the future.

Excellent news, and many thanks to those involved. It is these steps which get us all to the destination!

Good news. Well done RISC OS Developments and the programmers. I’ll go and have a beer. :-))

Great news! :)

Yes great news indeed.

Thanks to all those involved.

Great news, many thanks to the hard work of those involved, I look forward to wifi on my ArmBook and Pi 3s & 4s.

Amazing news, well done to all involved. :-)

I hope andrew will soon provide a ROM for ARMbook with increased SD speed and eMMC support. I do not use Linux on this computer and I will not use Linux any more once the Wifi support will be available on my ARMbook, so eMMC installation would be cool for speed and reliability.

Stupid question: do we have informations on when the current beta rom for the Pi will be built with the new SDIOdriver? It’s still SDIODriver 0.16 today, from 19 Jun 2021.

My SDIOdriver is also version 0.16, but with date 10 Aug 2019 – work that one out!

I’m hoping that we’ll be able to roll out Pinebook ROMs by end-of-week, subject to me confirming that the “install to eMMC” option (for both OS, and CMOS, and disc) is working correctly. It is supposed to (John’s had it working), but I need to zonk my Pine-Android install and check it as pure-RISC OS.

In related news, the A64 (pine64/pinebook) port has now been made fully open via the ROOL github, to coincide with this work.

There’s also ROMs awaiting final testing for iMX6 and mini.m.

Regarding Pi etc, all the code is submitted to ROOL, so it is really down to their approval/merge process.

Who’d’ve thought the wifi is an imaginary SD card slot!

Well done RISC OS Developments and programmers :-D

Who’d’ve thought the wifi is an imaginary SD card slot!

You’ve been able to get WiFi SD adaptors for a while. I think some of the better digital cameras can interact with them.

David,

Looking at the merge requests is one thing, but you need to wait for the build after the merges are pushed to master.

You could faff about building it yourself, but is much easier to wait!

Well done all involved and also thanks for opening up the A64 port

Sincerely grateful to all involved.

Well done everyone involved! Very exciting news :)

Thanks Andrew. That’ll be a nice update :)

Have try the latest OSupdate20 and install RISC OS to EMMC. Works very nice. WLAN is also visible.
Thanks a lot.