Snagboot has just received its second major version number increase since its initial release in 2023! The jump to 2.0 had been made to mark the introduction of Snagfactory, back in 2024. Almost two years have passed since then, and contributions to the project have been going strong! The milestone which underlies our decision to jump to 3.0 is a major overhaul of Snagfactory, turning it into a QT6-based app.
Let’s look back at some notable changes since the last release.
From Kivy to Qt6
The Snagfactory UI was initially built on Kivy, a pure-Python GUI toolkit. This decision was based on the lightweight, intuitive and declarative nature of Kivy, as well as the absence of large C dependencies. However, relying on Kivy as a Snagboot dependency has become impractical, since there has not been an official release of the project since 2024. This prevented Python 3.14 support for snagfactory, which was a deal-breaker for us.
After pondering our options, we settled on a Qt6-based solution, with PySide6 as the bindings package. The entire Snagfactory interface is now QT6-based, which also provides a much more familiar look and feel for users accustomed to mainstream Linux and Windows graphical applications!
Added support for ZStandard-compressed image files in fastboot-uboot
The fastboot-uboot mode of Snagflash already supports on-the-fly decompression of input files, for several common compression algorithms. However, the one notable missing entry was ZStandard, which was added to the Python standard library in the 3.14 release. Thanks to a backports package, we were able to add ZStandard support to snagflash without dropping the functionality for older Python versions.
Two new platforms supported by snagrecover
Our first Qualcomm platform support is for the IQ9075, and comes courtesy of Bakyaraj Moorthy. The IQ9075 support markedly differs from other recovery flows in the snagrecover ecosystem. It uses the custom Sahara USB protocol to send successive boot stages to the target.
Support for the TI DRA821U, AM68, TDA4VM, AM67 and AM69 platforms were also contributed, adding to the ever-expanding set of TI SoCs in snagrecover. This support comes courtesy of Romain Naour.
Going forward
One of the major upcoming topics for Snagboot is distro packaging. Being able to “apt install snagboot” or “pacman -S snagboot” and have things “just work” is quite an attractive perspective! We’d also like to get Rockchip support finalized and merged. Stay tuned for more news!
And as always, many thanks to everyone who participated to this release by contributing code and documentation to Snagboot or by reporting issues!