[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#985578: Bug#985578: arduino-core-avr: Flashing bootloader fails due to invalid size

[Rock Storm]

On Sun, 2021-11-14 at 02:18 +0300, Alexander Buzin wrote:
> My system is Debian bullseye+backports. No foreign apps.
> It seems that Debian includes an ancient version of optiboot (v.4.4 of
> January 2012). It is unusable because the size of the resulting
> bootloader is too big. Current version (v.8.3) can be compiled with
> our default toolchain and produces a hex file which has correct size
> and is identical to the one on the optiboot github (see the line above
> with diff).
> Maybe this information will be of some use, because the current
> situation with non working bootloader is quite inconvenient.
>

Thank you for you addition here.

I apologise in advance, I lack the knowledge/time to thoroughly test
this. But reading this got me thinking.

Open question to all list readers, am I right in thinking that:

 - Current avr-gcc toolchain is able to successfully compile the latest
optiboot (i.e. v8.0?)

 - Current arduino package (version 2:1.8.16+dfsg1-1~bpo11+1) is happy
with the hex files generated above.

Since we simply ship the very optiboot version that Arduino ships on
its ArduinoCore-avr repository. I'd conclude there is no other solution
than to request upstream the latest optiboot be shipped in the next
release? It's probably been requested already as in [1] but has seen no
movement in 4 years. Are there any big regression issues between
optiboot's versions 4.4 and 8.0?

[1]: https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/issues/121

Regards,

--
Rock Storm
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