Disk Access

Overview

The disk access API provides access to storage devices.

Initializing Disks

Since many disk devices (such as SD cards) are hotpluggable, the disk access API provides IOCTLs to initialize and de-initialize the disk. They are as follows:

Init/deinit IOCTL calls are balanced, so a disk will not de-initialize until an equal number of deinit IOCTLs have been issued as init IOCTLs.

It is also possible to force a disk de-initialization by passing a pointer to a boolean set to true as a parameter to the DISK_IOCTL_CTRL_DEINIT IOCTL. This is an unsafe operation which each disk driver may handle differently, but it will always return a value indicating success.

Note that de-initializing a disk is a low level operation- typically the de-initialization and initialization calls should be left to the filesystem implementation, and the user application should not need to manually de-initialize the disk and can instead call fs_unmount()

SD Card support

Zephyr has support for some SD card controllers and support for interfacing SD cards via SPI. These drivers use disk driver interface and a file system can access the SD cards via disk access API. Both standard and high-capacity SD cards are supported.

Note

FAT filesystems are not power safe so the filesystem may become corrupted if power is lost or if the card is removed without unmounting the filesystem

SD Memory Card subsystem

Zephyr supports SD memory cards via the disk driver API, or via the SDMMC subsystem. This subsystem can be used transparently via the disk driver API, but also supports direct block level access to cards. The SDMMC subsystem interacts with the sd host controller api to communicate with attached SD cards.

SD Card support via SPI

Example devicetree fragment below shows how to add SD card node to spi1 interface. Example uses pin PA27 for chip select, and runs the SPI bus at 24 MHz once the SD card has been initialized:

&spi1 {
        status = "okay";
        cs-gpios = <&porta 27 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;

        sdhc0: sdhc@0 {
                compatible = "zephyr,sdhc-spi-slot";
                reg = <0>;
                status = "okay";
                mmc {
                    compatible = "zephyr,sdmmc-disk";
                    status = "okay";
                };
                spi-max-frequency = <24000000>;
        };
};

The SD card will be automatically detected and initialized by the filesystem driver when the board boots.

To read and write files and directories, see the File Systems in include/zephyr/fs/fs.h such as fs_open(), fs_read(), and fs_write().

eMMC Device Support

Zephyr also has support for eMMC devices using the Disk Access API. MMC in zephyr is implemented using the SD subsystem because the MMC bus shares a lot of similarity with the SD bus. MMC controllers also use the SDHC device driver API.

Emulated block device on flash partition support

Zephyr flashdisk driver makes it possible to use flash memory partition as a block device. The flashdisk instances are defined in devicetree:

/ {
    msc_disk0 {
        compatible = "zephyr,flash-disk";
        partition = <&storage_partition>;
        disk-name = "NAND";
        cache-size = <4096>;
    };
};

The cache size specified in zephyr,flash-disk node should be equal to backing partition minimum erasable block size.

NVMe disk support

NVMe disks are also supported

Disk Access API Configuration Options

Related configuration options:

API Reference

Disk Access Interface

Disk Driver Configuration Options

Related driver configuration options:

Disk Driver Interface

Disk Driver Interface