R/r/w/F collapse into G and g over a selector byte naming the space — flash,
EEPROM, data, fuse, SPM — with the flash bank in its high nibble. Four command
bodies, four transfer loops and four argument decodes become one of each, and
W joins the same decode instead of keeping an address form of its own. The
loader shrinks while gaining everything below: on the 1284P the stock build
goes 480 -> 432 B and the software one 496 -> 450.
What the freed space buys:
- Data space. On AVR one pointer spans SRAM, the register file and the whole
I/O space, so G over space 2 reads all three. pureboot keeps zero static
RAM and pushes no register, so at loader entry an application's SRAM is
still what the application left there — this is a post-mortem, not just a
poke hole. As its own command it needed a dispatch arm and a loop; as one
more space it is a single ld/st.
- Host-issued SPM. W fills the page buffer and stops; erase, write and RWW
re-enable are writes to space 4, which reach the same fused store-and-SPM
pair through the transfer's own address and data. Any SPM operation, lock
bits included, is now reachable and the loader carries no page-commit logic.
The four-cycle SPMCSR-to-SPM window is why that primitive stays fused: no
host can hit it across a serial link, and that — not the byte count — is
the floor on how low-level a bootloader's primitives can go.
- Byte addresses everywhere. The bank in the selector retires the
word-addressed wire the >64 KiB parts needed, so the 1284s stop being the
outlier.
SERIAL autobaud is a third backend on the same loader, over libavr's
software_autobaud: no clock, no baud, one binary per chip for every F_CPU and
every rate. Activation counts poll iterations rather than seconds and bounds
every wait, so a stray pulse cannot hold an unattended device.
b answers with the version and signature only; the host derives geometry from
the signature, which is what an autobaud build requires anyway. An update image
is a bare slot with no device to ask, so every image carries a six-byte stamp —
the same bytes b answers with, and the source of both — that the loader never
reads from flash and the host refuses to install a mismatch against. The
running-slot write guard moved onto the SPM commit, which covers erase and
write both where guarding W covered neither directly.
The position-independence lint now proves the property instead of a proxy for
it: the image must come out byte-identical linked at a different base.
-fno-move-loop-invariants left the tuned flag set — it was fitted to a command
loop carrying four transfer bodies and costs bytes now that it carries one.
Verified: the exhaustive matrix on all 37 chips (every clock x every baud x
every backend, non-standard rates included, plus the autobaud build) —
8174 size checks, no failures, tightest fit the 1284s' autobaud at 510 of 512.
Behavioral suites green on every chip class: t13a 10/10, t85 11/11, m8 13/13,
m16a 13/13, m48pa 13/13, 328P 23/23, 644A 17/17, 1284P 17/17. Data-space
round trip through --peek/--poke and the autobaud handshake are both red-green
proven.
The two prototype sources and their findings file go; the README carries the
protocol and dev/done.md in libavr carries the reasoning.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The word-addressed 1284s were the one family deploying in a 1 KiB slot,
because the far-flash machinery (ELPM reads, RAMPZ page commands, a
word-addressed wire) did not fit 512 B. It does now: 478 B stock, 494 B in
the heaviest configuration the build can produce. They take the 644s'
geometry, where the smallest boot section holds the resident slot and its
staging slot together. The loader's version goes to 3; the host tool did
not change, so its own version stays 2 and only the window it speaks
widens.
Most of the saving is one restructure. The info block and a flash read are
the same act, so giving all four streamed commands one address-and-count
path leaves exactly one call site for the flash streamer: it inlines into
the never-returning command loop and its 24-bit cursor stops being saved
and restored around every transmit. Around it, the ack byte moved out of
line, the wire's byte pair is bit_cast into the word it already is, the
fuse loop ends on its count, the info block's in-slot offset is taken as
the one-byte relocation it is, and -fno-expensive-optimizations gives way
to -fno-move-loop-invariants -fno-tree-ter. Every chip shrank 14-18 B.
The size matrix grew the axes it was missing: the USART1 instance across
the whole clock ladder, and the shape a slow baud gives a software UART —
past 255 delay iterations libavr takes the 16-bit delay loop, which the
ladder default never selects and which was 4 B over the 1284's slot the
first time it was built.
The protocol fixture stopped deriving the loader entry from the flash
size; on the 1284s it had been jumping a slot low and reaching the loader
only because erased flash walked it up.
Docs and comments were consolidated across the port in the same pass: the
README carries a per-chip size table instead of prose, and prose that
restated the code is gone — 190 lines, no behaviour with it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The temporary page buffer is write-once per word, so a page filled over
one an earlier writer left dirty programs the stale words. The same
datasheet clause carries the cure: the buffer auto-erases after a page
write (§26.2.1; §19.2 on the tinies), so the corruption clears itself by
happening, and rewriting the page programs correctly.
The loader therefore clears the buffer nowhere. The tinies' CTPB and the
m48s' RWWSRE discard are gone; the boot-sectioned megas keep only the
trailing RWWSRE they need anyway to re-enable the RWW section for
read-back, which discards the buffer as a side effect and keeps them off
the path entirely. 434 B on the tiny13s, 438-442 on the tiny25/45/85,
430 on the m48s; the megas are unchanged, the 1284s still 506.
The host takes over the guarantee: a flash page that reads back wrong is
rewritten up to RETRIES times before the run stops. Both read-back paths
repair — verify_pages for programming, and write_differing, which is the
loader-update path where a page left wrong is a half-written loader slot.
That one is not hypothetical: deleting the discard made attiny85
pureboot.rehome fail deterministically there, the only flow still
assuming the old contract.
Protocol-visible, so README's W command says it: one W may program the
wrong bytes after a refused page, or after an application that
self-programmed entered without a reset, and a host that programs without
reading back cannot trust it.
Tests: pureboot.dirty drives the case the loader declines to guard — the
fixture application dirties every buffer word and jumps in with no reset
(hardware forbids that on a boot-sectioned mega, but simavr dispatches SPM
from anywhere, which is what makes it constructible) — and asserts a bare
verify sees the corruption, the repairing verify fixes it in one rewrite,
and it stays fixed. pbreloc asserts the same shape after a refusal.
test_planner covers the bound against a fake device: one bad write
repaired in a single rewrite, a page that never comes good stopping after
exactly three.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Device: boot-section detection probes SPMCR beside SPMCSR, the link
picks any hardware USART through the instance-aware lookups (URSEL
chips included), WDRF reads MCUSR-or-MCUCSR, and the >64 KiB shape
lands — word-addressed wire flash (info flag bit 1, page byte 0 means
256, base as a word address), far reads through flash_load_far, a
single 32-bit byte-cursor page walk (the 256-byte page wraps its low
byte exactly), and slot arithmetic in words (the return address
already is one). Host: addresses stay bytes internally and scale at
the wire, the boot-fuse decode becomes a per-signature table (byte
index + BOOTSZ ladder — the m168A's lives in EXTENDED), and the
planner tests pin every chip's ladder plus the word-addressed info
decode. Tests: the device runner serves every mega over the USART pty,
pbapp banners over the right link, the update rehearsal synthesizes
its assumed fuses from the tool's own table, and the PI lint tracks
the renamed info symbol. All six classic-mega/168A targets pass the
full suite (size, PI, planner, protocol, reloc, self-update) at
466–504 B; the 1284P builds await a libavr far-path slimming to make
its 512.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
check_pi.py asserts the two link-time facts position independence rests on
(no absolute jmp/call; the info block within the image's first 256 bytes);
the size gates drop to 510 on the tinies for the trampoline word.
New per-chip tests beside the reworked protocol test: the planner units
(programming orders and their recovery properties, the surgery, staging
composition, boot-fuse decode, and the update preflight's error/warning
matrix over synthetic fuse bytes), the relocated-copy sweep (the identical
image installed one slot lower serves the full command set — the PI
acceptance test, and the one that caught the temporary-buffer trap), and
the self-update end-to-end: --update-loader to a re-timed build
(pureboot9, byte-different by PUREBOOT_TIMEOUT alone), then every
power-fail phase killed mid-write, restarted from the runner's flash dump,
and completed by a re-run with the application intact throughout. The mega
rounds run the BOOTRST-unprogrammed profile: the fixture application's 'L'
jump is the application-owned loader entry that profile relies on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
