Compare commits

...

3 commits

View file

@ -1,13 +1,17 @@
# Simple dd-like image writer with additional security checks.
# WriteIMG Image Writer
This tool verifies your image automatically. The block size is currently set to
1 MiB, which should be enough to avoid trouble.
WriteIMG is a simple dd-like image writer with additional security checks for
Linux and soon FreeBSD. It tells you what you're about to do and warns you
about potential problems before they occur. It also features automatic image
verifications, and uses a suitable block size for fast and gentle writing.
Say goodbye to fried flash and overwritten bootloaders, no more footguns!
```
writeimg v0.2.0, Rev. 5323932-dirty
WriteIMG v0.2.3, Rev. d02fc5f
In honor of SwePwnage - the OG disk destroyer
Copyright (C) 2026 Imbus, BSD-2-Clause
Build date: 2026-02-07
Build date: 2026-02-21
Usage:
writeimg [-v] -d <device> <file.img>
@ -21,8 +25,14 @@ Args:
-V, --version Print version
```
We also provide a manpage, which targets OpenBSD-level quality. Incorrect or
outdated information is a bug.
## Testing
For testing, there is a shell script "test.sh" included. It sets up a block dev
and writes (and verifies) a bunch of nonsense to it. It boils down to:
```
dd if=/dev/zero of=./disk.img bs=1M count=1024
losetup -fP ./disk.img
@ -30,6 +40,75 @@ losetup -a
losedup -d /dev/loop0
```
Writes to a regular files is not currently in scope, although it would simplify
testing.
## Design Considerations
Most of the sanity checking is currently highly Linux specific. We should
prefer general/posix solutions that reach **at least** FreeBSD, preferably
OpenBSD and Solaris as well. FreeBSD did implement procfs, but its a Linux-ism
and it has since been deprecated. I would prefer not to turn this rather simple
code into macro-mozaic, as i've seen other similar projects do. After all, this
is just a juiced-up dd-rewrite at its core.
**Apple products are unsupported.** Im simply not interested in ensuring
compatibility with a walled-garden ecosystem. If *you* are, we can change that.
At the time of writing, my FreeBSD server is down for maintenance, which means
all of my development and testing is focused on AMD64, AArch64 and AArch32
Linux.
In the setup phase of the program, we can absolutely afford to do lots of
sanity checking via syscalls. Between each block write, we flush the disk
buffers. These flushes are larger (1 MiB when buffer is full) than the sector
size (often 4k or 64k) of the flash, so as far as i know, this is a gentle way
to write flash, and should not incur any significant performance overhead. 1
MiB is also a multiple of the most common sector sizes. We could write it all
with no flushing, but that would mean the progress indicator will measure
buffered writes, which is useless.
It should be possible to induce optimal block size, but this ide has not been
explored yet.
Currently when verifying the written data, we read from both the input file and
the output block device and do a byte-by-byte comparison. A CRC32 is also
calculated in the first pass of the input file read. In the second pass (the
verification stage), we calculate the CRC32 of the block device data and
compare that to our previous result. **This means that we currently use two
separate methods of verification**. The program allocates **two** separate
buffers in the startup phase for comparisons. This will change in the coming
releases, and we will rely only on the CRC.
De-allocation is handled in the interrupt vector as well as in the 'sad-paths',
but ultimately this program can be regarded as samurai-principled. We try to
handle deallocation, but exit on failure and let the kernel handle the rest.
The use of a crypto-grade checksumming algorithm was considered, but was
ultimately rejected in favour of a lookup based CRC32. Its simpler, faster and
easier to understand (See: [crc32.h](./crc32.h)). We may include a compile-time
option to disable the lookup table to reduce size for really small targets, but
we speculate that those targets are already satisfied with busybox-dd.
We also considered using libudev or any of its analogues, to determine the type
of block device (spinning or flash), but my somewhat inconclusive research
indicates that it does not include functionality to determine the medium type
(usb/sd/sata), which is ultimately what i would like to warn the user about.
The libudev library is also Linux specific.
We also need completion scripts for the most common shells. This includes csh,
bash and zsh. Should be easy enough when we set our minds to it.
See:
- `grep -nE 'BLK[A-Za-z0-9]+' /usr/include/linux/fs.h`
In particular, we're interested in BLKGETSIZE64 and BLKFLSBUF for now.
We can read the device info from:
- /sys/class/block/[name]/*
Like:
- /sys/class/block/[name]/device/model
- /sys/class/block/[name]/size
## Inspiration
See: