The README's deployment section now says what each build artifact is for:
the .hex is the programmer artifact (self-addressed into the top slot),
the .bin the self-update image — bare slot bytes a programmer would put
at address 0, where a boot-sectioned mega cannot even heal itself (SPM
only runs from the boot section) but a patched-vector chip runs the
position-independent copy and re-homes a build through the ordinary
--update-loader flow: the staging install and the word-0 redirect both
execute outside page 0's slot, so the running-slot guard never blocks it.
pbrehome.py is the acceptance test (misplaced at 0, guard intact,
re-home, app flash over the stale copy, banner); the staging slot is the
one position that cannot re-home itself, documented. The preflight's
wrong-chip refusal and loader_image's handling of padded images (peeled
to the slot content by the embedded base) are documented and the padded
case pinned in the planner.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chip table becomes family blocks covering all 37 targets. The m48s
are a new deployment class: no boot section, so the tiny profile spoken
over the hardware USART — host-patched reset vector, trampoline
hand-over, a 510-byte budget (474 B built), no fuse preflight — while
their RWWSRE store stays the buffer discard (Atmel-8271 §26.2); the
device keys the patch flag and the CPU-halt waits on the curated
boot-section capability and the discard on the RWWSRE bit itself. The
644s' 64 KiB is exactly the 16-bit byte space: plain LPM, byte wire
addresses, 498 B in a 512-byte slot — and their 1 KiB minimum boot
section holds the resident and staging slots together, so self-update
needs no fuse step (the update test's slot pick now keys word-flash on
base >= 64 KiB; base + slot merely touching the boundary stays
byte-addressed). The 1284 joins the 1284P's word-addressed 1 KiB slot at
558 B. BOOT_FUSE gains every boot-sectioned family's ladder and fuse
byte; the planner exercises them all. The sim scaffolding keys
patch-vector-ness instead of the atmega name prefix, the fixture app
picks its clock by family (the tiny25/45/13 builds surfaced the 16 MHz
fallthrough as garbled banners), and the runner's wrapped flash ioctl
performs the m48 discard simavr's no-RWW cores turn into a stray buffer
fill. Sizes across the fleet: 466-504 B megas, 474 B m48s, 498 B 644s,
488-502 B tinies, 558 B 1284s — every chip passing
size/pi/planner/protocol/reloc/update.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The far machinery (ELPM reads, RAMPZ page commands, wire-word math)
costs ~46 B over the m328P's 504, and the tsb-calibrated C++-to-asm
gap says no implementation of this feature set reaches 512 on this
chip — a boundary its hardware does not have anyway: the 1284P's
smallest boot sector is 1 KiB. The slot therefore becomes
per-geometry (512 B, or 1 KiB past 64 KiB), which the host derives
from the word-addressing flag; slot arithmetic unifies (the index is
the wire high byte with its low bit dropped in either unit), the
update preflight demands a two-slot boot section in the chip's own
terms, and pbapp's hand-back jumps to the real slot base. libavr's
far primitives split their RAMPZ/Z asm operands (a page never
crosses 64 KiB, so callers keep a byte and a 16-bit cursor — the
32-bit address folds away; flash_load_far's byte form becomes the
out-RAMPZ+elpm pair avr-libc's pgm_read_byte_far rebuilds per call),
and the host splits reads at 64 KiB boundaries. All ten chips pass
the full suite — the 1284P at 558 B including protocol, relocation,
and the power-fail self-update — with pureboot byte-identical across
generated and reflect modes everywhere, and the original three
chips' images unchanged to the byte (488/502/504).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <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>
The host tool takes either form — load_image() parses Intel HEX by extension
and treats anything else as raw bytes — but the build emitted only the HEX, so
the raw path had no artifact behind it. The reloc and update tests each shell
out to objcopy at runtime to produce one for themselves.
add_hex_output becomes add_image_outputs and emits both forms. The .bin is
byte-identical to the plain `objcopy -O binary` those tests generate (-R .eeprom
strips nothing the loaders carry), and decodes equal to the HEX payload — 504 B
at 0x7e00 either way for pureboot. Sizes come out at the flash sizes exactly
(504/510/836/526), so nothing stretches to the .data load address.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
avrdude programs Intel-HEX, not ELF, and the build produced only ELFs — so
flashing a loader to a real chip meant running objcopy by hand. add_hex_output()
hangs a POST_BUILD objcopy on each loader image: the three tsb tiers through
add_tsb_variant, pureboot, and the re-timed pureboot9. .eeprom is dropped, being
its own avrdude update.
It uses the toolchain file's CMAKE_OBJCOPY rather than a hardcoded path, so
every chip preset emits hex, not just the mega. pbapp keeps its ELF alone: the
update test converts it to a raw binary itself, and it is not a flashing target.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <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>
pureboot.py (Python stdlib only): images as raw binary or Intel HEX,
flash and EEPROM programming with read-back verify, erase composites,
fuse and info readout, activation-timeout configuration, and the
tinies' reset-vector surgery — the trampoline word below the loader,
page 0 written last.
The test spawns a simavr device (pureboot_device.c) — the mega's USART
as a pty; on the tinies a cycle-timed GPIO<->pty bridge for the polled
software UART plus the NVM module simavr's tiny cores lack (their SPM
opcode ioctls into a void and silently does nothing) — and drives it
with the real tool: knock from reset (erased-flash walk on the tinies),
program and verify both memories, timeout write, session reconnect, an
external reset through the patched vector, hand-over, and the fixture
application's banner. Results are cross-checked against ground-truth
memory dumps and an independent decode of the surgery's rjmp words,
red-verified against a sabotaged encoder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
No inline assembly, no global register variables; libavr does the
datasheet work. The device speaks primitives — flash read/page-program,
EEPROM read/write, fuse read, info block, EEPROM-resident activation
timeout, hand-over — and verify, erase, reset-vector surgery, and
timeout configuration live in the host tool. 490 B on the ATtiny13A,
510 B on the ATtiny85, 484 B on the ATmega328P, each linked into the
top 512 bytes of flash; per-chip size tests gate all three.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The second pass concluded the 168 B tricks->asm gap was per-call ABI
cost. Most of it was structure. Rebuilt around the oracle's own shape —
argless noinline primitives over a whole-loader call-saved register
protocol (g_addr in Y, count r16, window r7, direction latch r6), a
top-down erase_below whose loop tests against zero and hands callers
g_addr = 0 for free, bounded rx everywhere (a silent host unwinds to
the app from any state, as the oracle does), and a named tsb_app entry
that --pmem-wrap-around=32k relaxes to the wrapped rjmp:
tsb_asm 510 B in the 512 B section (oracle: 500), C++ except rx
and the page-store loop — the two routines whose remaining
cost is the calling convention itself (~30 asm lines, was
~280)
tsb_tricks 526 B, no assembly at all (was 666)
tsb_pure 836 B, still one readable function per command (was 842)
Every g_* update placement works around a GCC 16.1 wrong-code bug
(stores into global register variables deleted when only callees read
them — repro and rules in libavr dev/lessons.md). Also fixes two
latent hardware bugs all earlier tiers carried, masked by simavr's
zeroed register file: the crt-less entries never established
__zero_reg__ = 0, and the direction latch was read before written —
power-on registers are undefined.
All tiers full oracle feature parity, protocol tests green in both
libavr modes, .text byte-identical across modes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tricks 778->666: always_inline every single-call handler into the
[[noreturn]] reset entry (which pays no prologue, so their push/pop of
call-saved registers vanishes), walk the page pointer in Y (adiw, base
recovered as g_addr-page) instead of recomputing Z=base+offset, bring
the UART up in the two registers that are not already at their reset
value, and seed the activation counter as __uint24.
pure 896->842: TU-local internal linkage (proper hygiene, and it lets
the compiler inline the one-call handlers), a byte-wide activation
count, __uint24 timeout. Still one readable function per command.
asm unchanged at 498: its C++-expressible parts are already C++; the
core stays asm (the 666 B all-tricks tier is 168 B over — per-call ABI
tax, not a feature). All three cross-mode byte-identical, protocol green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
asm 502->498 B (below the oracle's 500): the stack bring-up moves to plain C++,
and a register is reserved for the config-page high byte instead of reloading it
at each app-flash-boundary compare. tricks 808->778 B: shared erase/rww helpers
plus the libavr half-duplex W1C fix. pure 950->896 B and no SRAM: streams
rx->SPM/EEPROM instead of staging a 128 B page buffer. All three keep full oracle
feature parity and stay byte-identical across modes; protocol tests (round-trip +
password + emergency erase) green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The -O3 leak is fixed upstream (cmake/release-os.cmake via CMAKE_PROJECT_INCLUDE),
so the port no longer needs its own string(REPLACE); a Release build is -Os
through the toolchain file. Verified: all three variants build at their sizes
(508/658/740) and pass the size + protocol ctest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The native-UART fixed-baud TinySafeBoot protocol, ported onto libavr as a
crt-free boot-section loader, in three variants that trade clarity for size:
tsb_pure 740 B idiomatic C++: SRAM page buffer, separate flash/EEPROM
leaves, shared framing; the polled `unused` guard posture.
tsb_tricks 658 B unified runtime-flag paths (noinline/noclone), call-saved
global-register page walk — attributes only, no asm.
tsb_asm 508 B streaming store + hand-rolled UART/SPM/EEPROM/erase loops;
fits the 512 B boot section (BOOTSZ=11). Trims the optional
password gate and WDT-reset bail — unreachable in C++ with
both (hand-asm is ~15 % denser). Tiers 1-2 keep them and
live in the 1 KB section they fit.
All three are .text byte-identical across libavr's generated and reflect modes.
The CMake build strips the leaked -O3 (a Release build is silently -O3, not the
-Os this loader is measured against) and gates each variant's size against its
section. A simavr harness (test/device.c + test/tsbtest.py) drives the real wire
protocol over a pty and flashes the device; the size and protocol tests run in
ctest. Verified byte-for-byte against the reference tsbloader_adv (C#/mono):
activate, read info, flash write + verify.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
