File system driver

My C++ification of the Loginator code continues. As noted below, I have the startup code now in full C++ (with 18 lines of inline asm), and I have overthrown the tyranny of main() (that sounds familiar, have I written on this topic before?). I have taken Roland Riegel's sd_raw driver and heavily modified and simplified it. Basically I made it a pure block device. I have dropped all the buffering. You can open an SD card (SDHC fully supported), read a block, write a block, and get the card info.

I looked into extending c++ifying the partition and fat32 driver, but it looked too complicated and messy. One of the things I am dead set against is dynamic memory allocation in an embedded process. What if it fails? When that happens, the software crashes (it wouldn't ask for memory if it didn't desperately need it) and when that happens, it is a good possibility that the device it is flying crashes too.

So, I get to write a fat32 driver myself. Once again, only whole blocks at a time. And to start with, only that which the USB bootloader and Logomatic need: read a file, write a file, delete a file. Also to start with, we fully support FAT32, but do not support long filenames.

One area where I am going to get myself in trouble is writing the file. Sometimes when you write a file, you have to change the file allocation table. When you do so, you need to read the sector containing the change, make the change, then write the new sector. This is all easy, but you need a buffer to do it. Also, you will need to read the table to find the next cluster. What buffer do you use? I know that the LPC2148 is not really memory-limited, but it still seems a waste to set aside a whole block buffer for this.

I started by writing a partition driver. You pass it an open and started SD object and a partition number, and it reads the partition table to get the info for that partition. From then on, you use the partition object to read and write blocks.