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 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>