buildroot uboot saveenv to emmc fat partition - raspberry-pi3

Question

I'm attempting to save the uboot environment to the FAT partition of an mmc device on a CM3 rpi module. The OS has been built in buildroot I can printenv and this shows the inbuilt env in the binary. The saveenv command is recognised, firstly states it's saving to fat and the filename is uboot-env.bin. The file exists and is found but the function bcm2835_transfer_block_pio seems to write nothing and repeatedly spits out fsm 1, hsts 000001. The mmc is selected as dev0 partition1 (0:1) in buildroot. Anyone come across this error and know how to fix it?
Source for mmc driver:
static int bcm2835_transfer_block_pio(struct bcm2835_host *host, bool is_read)
{
struct mmc_data *data = host->data;
size_t blksize = data->blocksize;
int copy_words;
u32 hsts = 0;
u32 *buf;
if (blksize % sizeof(u32))
return -EINVAL;
buf = is_read ? (u32 *)data->dest : (u32 *)data->src;
if (is_read)
data->dest += blksize;
else
data->src += blksize;
copy_words = blksize / sizeof(u32);
/*
* Copy all contents from/to the FIFO as far as it reaches,
* then wait for it to fill/empty again and rewind.
*/
while (copy_words) {
int burst_words, words;
u32 edm;
burst_words = min(SDDATA_FIFO_PIO_BURST, copy_words);
edm = readl(host->ioaddr + SDEDM);
if (is_read)
words = edm_fifo_fill(edm);
else
words = SDDATA_FIFO_WORDS - edm_fifo_fill(edm);
if (words < burst_words) {
int fsm_state = (edm & SDEDM_FSM_MASK);
if ((is_read &&
(fsm_state != SDEDM_FSM_READDATA &&
fsm_state != SDEDM_FSM_READWAIT &&
fsm_state != SDEDM_FSM_READCRC)) ||
(!is_read &&
(fsm_state != SDEDM_FSM_WRITEDATA &&
fsm_state != SDEDM_FSM_WRITESTART1 &&
fsm_state != SDEDM_FSM_WRITESTART2))) {
hsts = readl(host->ioaddr + SDHSTS);
printf("fsm %x, hsts %08x\n", fsm_state, hsts);
if (hsts & SDHSTS_ERROR_MASK)
break;
}
continue;
} else if (words > copy_words) {
words = copy_words;
}
copy_words -= words;
/* Copy current chunk to/from the FIFO */
while (words) {
if (is_read)
*(buf++) = readl(host->ioaddr + SDDATA);
else
writel(*(buf++), host->ioaddr + SDDATA);
words--;
}
}
return 0;
}