Aaru Progress Report: December 2021, January 2022, February 2022

Welcome to the first progress report of 2022.

A team of humans

A monthly report, should be, well, once a month. And it's been more time than that.

So the first entry in this report is an appreciation.

Aaru is made by humans, by a team of humans, people. And it is made in our free time because we're passionate. We're passionate about computing history, we're passionate about preservation.

But we're still humans, with feelings, that have to take care of their health, mental, and physically.

So if you don't see activity, ask yourself, not if the project is abandoned. Ask yourself, if the team, needs your help.

And your help as our users can come in many ways. Donations, friendship, patience...

Thanks!

CRC64 shenanigans

In early December while testing the new checksum libraries, we found a very, very severe problem. The implementation we used for CRC64 was completely wrong.

It is already fixed in the devel branch as well as the latest (as of this date) LTS release.

So consider any checksum, or create sidecar, you created from an image, to have an incorrect CRC64 value.

5.3.1 LTS Released

We already explained on a previous monthly report what LTS mean, and we're true to our words.

We've waited months for users reports, and we fixed all reports that showed transparent data loss, or fail of extraction, or corruption.

There were not many, but amongst them, we fixed dumping some MMC cards, as well as detecting some cards that cannot be dumped due to some problems with the Linux kernel drivers.

And we also fixed some problems in the extraction of some ISO9660 volumes.

You can find the released binaries at Github.

Future

So for the next months, and as our team's mental and physical health allow, we will focus on AaruFormat V2.

Hopefully for the next monthly report, we'll have something to show!

Have a great month ahead.