Nokia tips:

When developing this tool I've found some bugs and misfeatures that
should be fixed to make flashing safer and cleaner.

Before reading the list of the following items I would like to say that
Nokia has done a wonderful work on this device on the flashing/nolo parts,
it's really hard to break the device and it works pretty nice. BTW I
think that there are some things that should be fixed.


*) Flashing at low battery level

  When the device is under a certain limit of battery it will not start,
  this is done by initfs, without any warning message or so, this really
  scares end users, because the battery level check is done in the initfs
  boot stage, not inside NOLO, so it's possible to flash the device on
  low level batteries.

  This is *really* dangerous and not very user friendly.


*) Internal nolo state not reset'd

  It's possible to get nolo on a strange state that always returns error
  when flashing pieces, it's mandatory to reboot the device to recover
  the original nolo state and be able to flash again.

  This is an strange and not very clear to me.


*) Buffer overflows

  The original nokia flasher has some buffer overflow bugs that should
  be fixed. They're safe for 99.9% of cases, but bofs on critical programs
  like this one should not be there.

  If nokia releases the source of the flasher it would be easier to make it
  better and safer. BTW the original flasher is much more secure and reliable
  than this one.


*) Weird firmware format

  The (new and old) FIASCO firmware format is not a very clean format, it
  doesn't provide any checksumming facility to ensure that the contents of
  the firmware have been modified or incorrect, so I'll rather encourage
  to design and create a standard firmware format for embedded devices with
  checksumming, signatures, handling libraries, documentation and so.

  I'll happily collaborate on the design of this open firmware format, and
  it would be used on all the open source-based devices to aim interoperability
  between devices and flashers, providing a more standard and reliable way of
  flashing devices.

  This will ease the development on new devices, so the information and the
  code could be revised and enhanced by zillions of eyes.


*) Poor checksumming

  The only checksum is a 16 bit xor of the whole firmware piece and it's only
  checked after sending the piece to the device.

  This is not very safe, because 16 bit checksum is a very low-quality
  algorithm. It currently performs a unique check at the end, it could be
  better to check each data block to avoid errors or invalid flashing, isn't it ?

*) No validation of pieces before flashing

  I've implemented a minimal check of the pieces to avoid flashing invalid
  pieces on the wrong place. This is done in fpid.c (firmware piece identifier).

  This should avoid end users to flash initfs on the kernel or weird things
  that can (pseudo)brick the device.


*) Reverse flashing

  If you want to test a new firmware, but you don't want to loose all the
  contents of your device. The only way to do that (afaik) is from the
  device. That's done with `0xFFFF -e [path]`.

  IMHO the reverse flashing (dump) should be implemented inside the bootloader
  (NOLO in this case), and allow to retrieve (at least) the most critical
  pieces of the firmware before flashing a new ones, and restore them in
  case of a wrong checksumming (for example)


*) Documentation

  The nokia flasher comes as is, without documentation. This is not good
  to anybody, because the lack of information is always the root of problems,
  fear and ignorance.

  So giving a minimal documentation about how to use the flasher (not only
  the basic usage stuff (like the maemo community has done in the wiki)
  would be good for everybody.