embassy-boot

An Embassy project.

A lightweight bootloader supporting firmware updates in a power-fail-safe way, with trial boots and rollbacks.

The bootloader can be used either as a library or be flashed directly with the default configuration derived from linker scripts.

By design, the bootloader does not provide any network capabilities. Networking capabilities for fetching new firmware can be provided by the user application, using the bootloader as a library for updating the firmware, or by using the bootloader as a library and adding this capability yourself.

Overview

The bootloader divides the storage into 4 main partitions, configurable when creating the bootloader instance or via linker scripts:

• BOOTLOADER - Where the bootloader is placed. The bootloader itself consumes about 8kB of flash, but if you need to debug it and have space available, increasing this to 24kB will allow you to run the bootloader with probe-rs.
• ACTIVE - Where the main application is placed. The bootloader will attempt to load the application at the start of this partition. The minimum size required for this partition is the size of your application.
• DFU - Where the application-to-be-swapped is placed. This partition is written to by the application. This partition must be at least 1 page bigger than the ACTIVE partition.
• BOOTLOADER STATE - Where the bootloader stores the current state describing if the active and dfu partitions need to be swapped.

For any partition, the following preconditions are required:

• Partitions must be aligned on the page size.
• Partitions must be a multiple of the page size.

The linker scripts for the application and bootloader look similar, but the FLASH region must point to the BOOTLOADER partition for the bootloader, and the ACTIVE partition for the application.

For more details on the bootloader, see the documentation.

Hardware support

The bootloader supports different hardware in separate crates:

• embassy-boot-nrf - for the nRF microcontrollers.
• embassy-boot-rp - for the RP2040 microcontrollers.
• embassy-boot-stm32 - for the STM32 microcontrollers.