The ATtiny13A run left autobaud's low-clock lock looking unreliable: 1/5 at
19200 on a 1.2 MHz RC part. The simulator does not reproduce it. At an exact
clock the calibration is solid down to ~36 cycles a bit and fails outright by
~31 — a sharp edge, not a fraying one — where the real part was already 1 in 5
by ~59. So the effect is the oscillator's own jitter and not backend logic, and
the two floors are different quantities about a factor of two apart.
Both are worth having. pureboot.autobaud gates a tight-bit point, since its two
existing clock points both sat near 100 cycles a bit and would not notice the
floor moving. The README carries the other half: both floors side by side, the
per-clock envelope measured on silicon, and the reason budgeting the logic's ~36
on an RC part is wrong.
It also carries the trap that produced the confusion. On a patched-vector chip an
erased application region walks back up into the loader, so every expired window
opens another and the host's retries eventually catch the pulse — 5/5 where the
same part with an application resident gives 1/5. Measure with an application in
place, or the fixture flatters the backend.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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