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>
--info prints the decoded info block field by field and --fuses each
byte on its own line plus the BOOTSZ/BOOTRST meaning on boot-sectioned
megas. Transfers that take wire time draw a transient progress bar on
stderr when it is a tty — logs, pipes and the tests see only the
summary lines. -v/--verbose narrates decisions: knock counts, the
programming plan, update state handling and per-phase page counts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The update flow's first step wrote the staging content over whatever the
staging slot held; with a loader running right there (programmed by hand
onto erased flash), that write met the copy's own running-slot guard on
the composed through-word and the tool stopped at its verify — although
the copy is exactly an installed staging copy, able to stream the new
resident like any other. The install is now skipped when the slot holds a
complete loader: its info block where every image carries it, matching
the device's byte for byte, and the slot unchanged since the update began
(the state file's snapshot) — so a resumed half-written install still
differs from its snapshot and takes the install path, which completes it.
pbrehome gains the staging-slot position (an older build at stage
streaming a newer resident in); the README's wrong "cannot re-home from
the staging slot" claim is corrected.
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 build emits an Intel HEX beside every loader image, but --update-loader
could not consume one: load_image() anchors every image at address zero, and
a loader HEX links at its base, so it decoded to a 32760-byte blob carrying
504 bytes of loader at the end. staging_content() then refused it as "loader
image is 32760 B, the slot holds 512" - an error naming neither the cause nor
the raw .bin the tool wanted instead.
Drop the blank below the base in the update path. The base comes from the
image's own info block rather than the device's, so an image built for
another target survives the slice intact and the preflight still reports it
as another target rather than failing to find an info block at all.
Verified on an ATmega328P: the full self-update flow driven straight from
pureboot_timeout-5s.hex, resident slot byte-for-byte against the image
afterwards, application preserved; both refusal paths unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The host tool was standard-library-only but POSIX-only with it: termios and
select() bound the port layer, and importing termios failed outright on
Windows, so the module could not even load there.
Split Port into PosixPort (unchanged) and a WindowsPort over the Win32 serial
API through ctypes, picked by os.name; every call site keeps the Port name.
kernel32 only, so the standard-library constraint holds.
Windows has no select() for a COM handle, so the read deadlines move into the
driver as COMMTIMEOUTS, re-armed per read: read_available() ends on a gap
longer than a USB-serial latency timer coalesces (16 ms on FTDI parts),
read_exact() on the count or its deadline. Opening asserts DTR and RTS as a
POSIX open does, so a board wiring DTR to reset still pulses it. A failed
configuration closes the handle before raising - a COM handle is exclusive,
and the leak met the next open as "Access is denied". Win32 takes any integer
baud and a driver may accept one its hardware cannot produce (an FT232R
reports back a baud of 3 and keeps the old divisor), so obvious nonsense is
refused where termios' table would have.
Tested against an ATmega328P on COM6: info, fuses, both memories programmed
and verified, session reconnect, hand-over, the loader self-update, and the
write guard on its own slot. test_planner runs on Windows now as well.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The image now runs from any 512-byte slot with every command intact:
control flow stays PC-relative, the write guard keys on the running slot
(the return-address anchor, computed once), the info block is addressed
from that same anchor as a byte pair (no absolute 16-bit address in the
image), and the application jump is an indirect call through a noipa-
laundered pointer to the absolute entry. 'J' — jump to a wire word
address, the one transfer primitive — replaces 'G': the host knows the
application entry from the info block, and moving between loader copies
needs arbitrary targets. The activation window is a compile-time 8 s
(PUREBOOT_TIMEOUT overrides), counted as a single calibrated poll loop.
A refused page no longer poisons the write-once temporary buffer (a real
silicon trap: the next write would program the drained data): every page
write discards the buffer first — CTPB on the tinies, on the mega the same
RWWSRE store that re-enables RWW after programming. The tinies' post-op
busy-waits go with it: their CPU halts through page erase and write.
488 / 502 / 504 B on t13a / t85 / mega — under the tinies' 510-byte budget,
whose last slot word is the host-managed trampoline: the resident's holds
the application entry, a staging copy's the jump through which an abandoned
update still times out into a loader.
The host tool updates the loader with itself: --update-loader installs the
identical image one slot below the resident, jumps into it, lets it rewrite
the resident, and restores the staging region from a state file — each
phase idempotent off the flash state, resumable after any interruption
(t13a: the staging slot carries the reset vector, written last in and
first out; t85: word 0 redirected around the resident rewrite; mega:
fuse-matrix preflight with a hard BOOTSZ gate and --assume-fuses for
simulators). Application flashing recovers by reset from any interruption:
patched page 0 and trampoline first, erase descending, and a walk-region
refusal behind --force on BOOTRST-below-loader megas.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pureboot.py: reject an empty image file with a clear error instead of
an IndexError deep in the vector-surgery planner; tighten the erase
docstring (order is irrelevant there — every target byte is the same
value, unlike a real flash where page 0 must go last).
pureboot_device.c: the GPIO bridge's bit_cycles used plain truncating
division where the firmware computes its own bit period with
round-to-nearest (uart.hpp: (Clock.hz + Baud.bd/2)/Baud.bd) — one
cycle off per bit on both tinies, harmless in practice but needless
drift against a firmware built to a different constant. Matched
exactly. Also clear the queued-bytes/decode-in-progress bridge state
on the test-only reset signal, so a future reset-mid-transfer scenario
can't feed a freshly reset chip bytes queued for its previous life.
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>
