Bootlin has published the first release of the Snagboot toolkit, designed to restore and flash embedded devices that have stopped booting, for example, due to firmware corruption. The Snagboot code is written in Python and is licensed under the GPLv2.
Most embedded platforms provide USB or UART interfaces for recovery and boot image transfer in case of firmware corruption, but these interfaces are specific to each platform and require the use of recovery utilities associated with products of individual manufacturers. Snagboot acts as an analogue of specialized, mostly proprietary, utilities for restoring and flashing devices, such as STM32CubeProgrammer, SAM-BA ISP, UUU and sunxi-fel.
Snagboot is designed to work with a wide range of boards and embedded devices, eliminating the need for embedded system developers to learn the specifics of using different utilities. For example, the first release of snagboot can be used to recover devices based on ST STM32MP1, Microchip SAMA5, NXP i.MX6/7/8, Texas Instruments AM335x, Allwinner SUNXI, and Texas Instruments AM62x SoCs.
The toolkit includes two utilities for downloading and flashing:
- snagrecover - uses vendor-specific ROM code mechanisms to initialize external RAM and launch the U-Boot bootloader without changing the contents of permanent memory.
- snagflash - Interacts with a running U-Boot to flash the system image to non-volatile memory using DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade), UMS (USB Mass Storage) or Fastboot.
Source: opennet.ru