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 (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>
