SLE10SP1 Ricoh internal cardreaders

From openSUSE

What cardreaders is this about

This driver ("sdhci") is mainly of use for the internal memory cardreaders of Ricoh (R5C822) which are often found in IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads and some Samsung notebooks.

Beware of this backport - its ugly and bites

The sdhci driver was first seen upstream in kernel 2.6.17 (although i wouldn't recommend to use it before 2.6.18), so the SLE10SP1 2.6.16 kernel doesn't come with this feature by itself. Further the problem is that this backport is rather big, intrusive (quite changes the whole mmc subsystem) and has not seen any real review let alone any quality assurance testings.

So, this is a unofficial, not at all supported backport i (Frank Seidel <fseidel@suse.de>) did when i just started digging through the kernel, trying to become myself a kerneldeveloper (having near to zero experience with a major backport like this). But actually the backported driver worked for me and i never experienced any problems, but maybe i was just lucky.

Please also be aware this driver _may_ lead to dataloss when using it to write to your sd or mmc memory cards, while i consider reading to be mainly safe with it.

Again: You may use this driver as is (and of course i'm always thankful for any feedback or even bugreports), but don't blame me or even Novell and openSUSE for any damage/harm it will do to your system or data.

How to install

You'll find the backported driver as KMP packages in my home:fseidel:sdhci-backport repository inside the openSUSE buildservice. So,

1. Add the repository to your installation sources. The URL is "http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/fseidel:/sdhci-backport/SLE_10/"
2. Go to your software management to install the "sdhcibackport_2.6.16" package (containing the userspace-part, actually the udev rules) and the KMP-package "sdhcibackport_2.6.16-kmp-default" or "sdhcibackport_2.6.16-kmp-smp" (depending on the kernel you are running - check e.g. with "uname -r").
3. Either reboot or (as root) do a "depmod -a ; modprobe sdhci ; /sbin/udevcontrol reload_rules"

How to use it

If you are using gnome or KDE desktop you should simply get a nice popup window showing you the content of the sd/mmc card when you plug it in. Otherwise you will just see a additional /dev/mmcblk0 device representing the card and /dev/mmcblk0p1 for its first partition, /dev/mmcblk0p2 for the second partition and so forth (usually there is only one, formated with FAT) which can be mounted as any other blockdevice.