diff options
author | Arnav Bhatt <arnav@ghativega.in> | 2023-11-04 00:52:28 +0530 |
---|---|---|
committer | Arnav Bhatt <arnav@ghativega.in> | 2023-11-04 00:54:18 +0530 |
commit | b17485dec99f5df86620eb15c5ae32dd85d3a4a2 (patch) | |
tree | 87c876349dafa643d9ab78fdc582ae06be2356d2 /articles/utkirna-v1.0.0.md | |
parent | 71b91fe4c765e52d64d4ec3641747fee5aebb73e (diff) |
utkirna
Diffstat (limited to 'articles/utkirna-v1.0.0.md')
-rw-r--r-- | articles/utkirna-v1.0.0.md | 25 |
1 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/articles/utkirna-v1.0.0.md b/articles/utkirna-v1.0.0.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f93c978 --- /dev/null +++ b/articles/utkirna-v1.0.0.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Utkirna v1.0.0 + + +This is the initial release of Utkirna, a cross-platform application heavily inspired from [Win32DiskImager](https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/) that lets you to write a raw disk image to a removable device or backup a removable device to a raw image file. It is useful for preparing bootable drives with "dd like" images for PC, SBC and embedded development boards as well for backing up such drives. +Utkirna (devanagari: उत्कीर्ण, romanized: Utkīrṇa) means "engraved" in Sanskrit. + +### The reason of its creation +I always wanted to created this sort of application for a long time, perhaps ever since [balenaEtcher](https://etcher.balena.io/) was a thing as I hated the idea of an electron app which basically mimicks what `dd` command does while consuming unnecessary amount of memory for doing such a simple task. I am aware that people don't like using `dd` due to screwing things up easier, but this certainly was not the way. Suprisingly, there are not other cross-platform applications which does similar job to my knowledge even till this day. The only application that I know that was similar to balenaEtcher is Win32DiskImager which obvious by its name, is only for Windows. Hence, this started my interest to develop similar cross-platform application which isn't made using dreaded electron. + +### Development +Earlier on, I was planning to use C with [Nuklear](https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear) (for the UI) for the development. However, as I started experimenting with [Go](https://go.dev/), I realised that it would be more sensible to use this language for desktop applications due to its simplicity yet not losing a lot of performance compared to C. And after discovering about [Fyne](https://fyne.io/) a fantastic GUI toolkit, this pretty much sealed the deal for me. + +To have some kind of idea on how these type of applications worked (on the basis of how it read or write a disk or a raw image file), Win32DiskImager greatly helped me and even clarified me on what sort of libraries would I require to accomplish this task. The only real issue I had was to implement my own Windows interfaces for some IOCTL and FSCTL operations (which is done through [DeviceIoControl](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset/nf-ioapiset-deviceiocontrol)) as Go didn't have native support for those (which I am going to upstream someday) but it really wasn't hard to do so. + +### Features +In the current state, the program supports: +- Reading through a removable disk and saving it as a raw image file. +- Writing a raw image file or anything which is "dd compatible" to the disk. +- Verification of a raw image through the disk and vice versa. + +### Installation & Usage +Go to the [Github repository](https://github.com/arnavbhatt288/utkirna) for further instructions. + +;tags:software open-source +;description:Initial release of Utkirna |