Sylnar v1.1.39

Added

• A short What’s new popup now appears once after upgrading to a new version. It is not shown on every launch or on a fresh install.

Changed

• Increased the confirmed-readable DMA sample pool target from 50,000 to 200,000 pages.
• Memory-map scanning now probes one 4 KB page per 256 KB block instead of per 2 MB block, producing finer region boundaries and excluding smaller unreadable ranges.

Fixed

• Removed the whole-block read optimization and restored v1.1.37-style block probing.
• Removed the Microsoft Internet Symbol Store terms-of-use popup. DMA initialization now disables MemProcFS connections to the Microsoft Symbol Server on every code path; locally cached symbols can still be used.

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Community & Support

• Join the Sylnar Discord for product updates, compatibility checks, and support.
• Sylnar Tool documentation

Sylnar v1.1.38

Fixed

• Verify every 4 KB page before including it in the DMA map, preventing intermittent read failures with VBS and IOMMU enabled.
• Prevent cancelled memory-map scans from being published as complete.

Sylnar v1.1.37

Fixed

• The startup launcher now requests administrator rights itself. Windows
  can therefore elevate the outer launcher before it starts the management
  tool, instead of failing with error 740 on the first launch.
• Startup no longer crashes in UIAutomationCore.dll on affected Windows 11
  systems. Sylnar windows suppress the WM_GETOBJECT request that triggers
  an Avalonia 11.2.3 Control Flow Guard failure.

Sylnar v1.1.35

Fixed

• Sylnar could close while starting after an unclean shutdown. The app no
  longer removes extracted native libraries while they may still be needed by
  the current run.

Sylnar v1.1.34

Fixed

• A flash whose erase does nothing no longer writes a corrupt image. Until now
  Sylnar noticed the erase had not happened, said so, and then spent three minutes
  writing anyway. Writing to flash that was not erased can only ever produce a
  broken image, so the board could not boot from it. Sylnar now stops at the very
  first page, before anything of substance is written, and starts the flash again
  from the beginning. It tries up to three times.
• If all three attempts fail to erase, Sylnar writes nothing at all and says so.
  The board keeps whatever was on it rather than being left unbootable.

Why three: the same board has been seen to erase properly on one attempt and do
nothing on the next with nothing else changed. The cause of that is still open,
and every attempt is recorded in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Sylnar\flash\.

Sylnar v1.1.33

Fixed

• Sylnar now says when the flash chip is refusing to be written. A flash record
  from a failing board showed what is really happening: the chip accepts the
  command that unlocks writing, then silently ignores every erase and reports no
  error, so writing starts over data that was never cleared. That is what a
  write-protected chip does. Before each erase Sylnar now reads the chip's two
  status registers and says plainly whether protection is on and how much of the
  chip it covers. Nothing is written to the chip to find this out.
• The warning about a too-fast erase now says outright that the board will not boot
  from what is being written, and names the protection as the cause when the chip
  reports it.

Changed

• Reverted the slower flashing link from v1.1.32. It was meant to fix the
  skipped erase and the same flash record proved it did not: at the lower speed
  every erase still finished in two or three milliseconds. It only made flashing
  slower, so the link is back to its previous speed.

Sylnar v1.1.32

Fixed

• Flash could skip the erase and go straight to writing. On some runs the erase
  ended the instant it started, and only a few restarts got a real one. The flash
  programmer asks the chip whether it is still busy and treats the first "not busy"
  answer as the end of the erase, so a single misread answer ends an erase that
  never happened. That answer travels over the USB-JTAG link, which was running at
  15 MHz on an adapter chip whose timing is known to be unreliable at high clock
  rates. That is the most likely cause, so SPI flashing now runs the link at
  3.75 MHz. Flashing takes a little longer. If an erase still ends too early, the
  new flash record below shows it.
• Closing Sylnar during a flash left the programmer running, unseen. It kept
  erasing and writing in the background, and a flash started from a new window
  then shared the USB-JTAG link with it, which spoils both. Closing during a flash
  now asks first: keep flashing, or stop the flash and close, which leaves the
  board needing a new flash. A programmer still running from an earlier window is
  stopped before a new flash starts.

Changed

• Every SPI flash now leaves a complete record. Sylnar used to keep only its
  own short summary of a flash and throw away everything the programmer printed,
  so when an erase went wrong there was nothing to look at afterwards. Each flash
  now writes a timestamped record to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Sylnar\flash\, and the log
  names the file at the start of the flash. The newest 20 are kept. The record is
  written as it happens, so it survives closing the window part-way through.
• The log now says how the erase went: whether the chip was erased sector by
  sector or as a whole, how long it took, and how long after the flash chip was
  detected the writing began.
• A too-fast erase is flagged. If the erase finishes faster than a real flash
  erase can, Sylnar warns that the flash may not have been erased before writing.

The firmware written and the steps used to write it are unchanged; the link to the
board runs slower.

Sylnar v1.1.31

Changed

• The startup and shutdown screens now look like the rest of the app. They had
  been designed separately and had drifted: a different Sylnar logo, with a
  gradient fill and a teal glow instead of the flat tile the app shows in its
  sidebar, on rounder panels than any surface in the app. The logo is now the same
  mark everywhere, scaled rather than redrawn, and both screens use the app's own
  colours, type and progress bars.
• The shutdown screen now carries the Sylnar mark and says what it is doing, rather
  than only "Please wait".

Fixed

• A flash that failed could blame the wrong thing. Some chips refuse the fast
  whole-chip erase and fall back to erasing sector by sector. If a flash took that
  path and then failed for any unrelated reason, Sylnar read the fallback notice as
  a failure and reported the chip as write-protected, advising an external
  programmer and a chip clip that were never needed. Genuine write protection is
  still reported.
• The shutdown screen had square corners where every other window is rounded, and
  put a second Sylnar button in the taskbar for as long as it was open.
• A failure while the startup screen was on its way out could leave the app running
  with no window at all. The startup screen now always hands over.

Nothing about what is written to the board changed in this release.

Sylnar v1.1.30

Fixed

• The Erase step now appears when it should. Pressing Flash often went
  straight to Write with no Erase step, and only sometimes showed the erase
  after a few restarts. The board was always being erased — the app simply
  could not see it happening. Most SPI chips erase in one whole-chip command
  that reports nothing while it runs, and the only line the app watched for is
  one the chip prints solely on the slower sector-by-sector fallback. The erase
  is now shown for both, with per-sector progress where the chip reports it.
• A chip that refuses the fast whole-chip erase and falls back to erasing
  sector by sector now says so in the log, which is also why those runs take
  noticeably longer.
• The step bar, the percentage and the status line no longer jump backwards.
  Progress arrives on two separate streams that are read independently, so a
  late line could previously drag the display back a step.

Nothing about what is written to the board changed in this release.

Sylnar v1.1.29

New

• Compact redesign (1100×680 by default, resizable down to 1000×560)
  • Sidebar navigation replaces the tabs: Board & Flash, Drivers, DMA Test,
    BAR Probe. Its Hardware card shows the CH347 and FT601 driver status,
    checked in the background at launch, and the footer shows the update
    check result and whether Sylnar runs as Administrator.
  • The log is a dock under every page, with All / Warnings / Errors filters,
    a line count, Copy (copies what the filter shows) and a collapse button.
  • New type: IBM Plex Sans for the interface, JetBrains Mono for IDs,
    addresses and the log (both SIL OFL, bundled in Assets/Fonts).
• Board & Flash: board and firmware side by side. The board card shows
  the part, family, detection time, IDCODE, package, cable and the BSCAN
  bridge used for flashing; the DNA is grouped in fours and Copy confirms
  with "Copied". The firmware card shows the flash mode (SPI flash or SRAM),
  a Bridge · Erase · Write · Done step bar, the live percentage and the
  elapsed time. A .bin or .bit file can be dropped on the card.
• Drivers: CH347 and FT601 drivers side by side (the FT601 driver moved
  here from the DMA tab), each with its device, VID/PID, version, driver,
  a plain-language status and Check / Install / Reinstall / Uninstall.
  "Check both" checks the two at once.
• DMA Test: test type is a segmented control next to Run test. Results
  show a coloured rating banner, six metric tiles (labelled for the stress
  test's own figures) and the rating scale with the reached level lit.
  The memory-map card shows the cache age and where the map is saved.
• BAR Probe: the PCIe device list loads when the page is first opened;
  clicking a row copies its BAR start into Address. Last read shows the hex
  dump with offsets, DWORDs as tiles, or the decoded config header.

Changed

• Cancel is only enabled while it can still take effect (before the SPI
  erase starts), and says so next to the button.
• Splash, update and shutdown windows use the new colours; the update
  window's logo letter is now "S".