pureboot.py: an update follows the staging copy onto its own link

--update-loader works by entering copies of the *new* image and letting them
rewrite the resident. Those copies speak the link they were built for, but the
host went on knocking with the session's baud and backend — the resident's. Where
the image changed either, the staging copy was installed and then never answered:
resident untouched, and on a 1 KiB tiny the staging slot is the whole application
region, so the application was already gone.

The wire cannot be probed for it. 512 bytes of position-independent code carry no
header saying what rate they were built for, so the operator declares it:
--staged-baud and --staged-autobaud, applied from the jump into the staging copy
onward. Retuning goes through the open port — SetCommState or tcsetattr on the
live handle, never a reopen — because a DTR pulse would reset the copy being
talked to. Undeclared against a changed link it still cannot work, but the error
now names that as the cause instead of reporting the bare activation timeout that
sent the operator looking at wiring.

The README's idempotence claim needed the same qualification: from step 2 a
re-run must reach the new image, and after step 3 word 0 points at the staging
copy, so on a patched-vector part the resident's link reaches nothing at all.

Found on an ATtiny13A, where two controls differing only in the activation window
updated cleanly and so isolated the link as the variable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-07-27 16:31:27 +02:00
committed by BlackMark
parent 433bec3e58
commit 77dd45aeca
4 changed files with 297 additions and 17 deletions

View File

@@ -162,6 +162,8 @@ if(PROJECT_IS_TOP_LEVEL)
${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/pureboot/pureboot.py)
add_test(NAME pureboot.handshake
COMMAND ${Python3_EXECUTABLE} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/test/test_handshake.py)
add_test(NAME pureboot.updatelink
COMMAND ${Python3_EXECUTABLE} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/test/test_update_link.py)
endif()
# The protocol test flashes this fixture through the loader with the real