Release 0.9.4 rc.2

Release 0.9.4-rc.2

Release: 0.9.4
Build: 0.9.4-rc.2
Status: regression-fix release candidate

0.9.4-rc.2 supersedes rc.1 after an independent audit reproduced two Automation/persistence defects. The candidate is intentionally narrow: no new media feature, BLE wire-format change, or PSRAM-budget increase is included.

Fixed

• Schedule generation commit is blocked while the protocol still owns an active Program multipart transfer, preventing a 900 ms quiet-period commit from publishing only the previously completed activity.
• Alarm replacement keeps the previous media backup until NVS metadata persistence succeeds. NVS failure restores previous media/metadata; unrecoverable rollback converges to an empty slot.
• Boot recovery clears an Alarm whose configured media cannot be recovered with the expected size.
• Alarm and Schedule clock fields are range-validated before persistence.
• Schedule staging is allocated before replacement flags are published.
• Host sanitizer coverage now includes WLED adapter, CompactGif, 11-bit media and external-buzzer bridge harnesses.

Unchanged qualified media policies

Waveshare ESP32-S3-RGB-Matrix: 2 MiB transient stage maximum, 4 MiB reserve, 1 MiB source cache, 512 KiB per entry, 12 metadata entries, one-item / 250 ms look-ahead.

Adafruit MatrixPortal ESP32-S3: 256 KiB transient stage maximum, 1 MiB reserve, 384 KiB source cache, 256 KiB per entry, 8 metadata entries, one-item / 250 ms look-ahead.

Final external gates

Before stable promotion, run the real WLED/PlatformIO compile matrix and a focused Automation smoke from the official app. The package host tests cover the two rc.1 regressions with multipart and NVS-failure injection.

Documentation/package closure

The rc.1 audit follow-up also corrects the classic ESP32 baseline reference, stale Waveshare qualification wording, release navigation and target-role terminology. The Wiki package now includes the six local hardware images referenced by Controller Boards and LED Matrices.