# Software Update and Back Compatibility



## wrmcpherson (5 mo ago)

The latest software update (v 11.0 on the Model S) seems to have lost back compatibility. The map no longer shows areas of heavy traffic, a major loss of functionality. The radio panel no longer shows links to online radio stations, which were necessary where the broadcast signal was weak and staticy. When will these functions be restored?


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## Klaus-rf (Mar 6, 2019)

Anybody's guess - if ever.


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## Ed Woodrick (May 26, 2018)

Did you click the map and then make sure that the traffic was turned on? I know that it has disappeared for me once or twice, easily just turned back on.

Not really understanding what a link to an online station when signals get weak is, have you tried adding one back? (I'm not sure why a link to an online station would help a cellular signal getting weak means)


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## DocScott (Mar 6, 2019)

I agree with @Ed Woodrick. Sometimes the process of updating firmware causes settings to change. It's not that a feature has disappeared from the new firmware; it's just that you have to hunt through the menus and buttons to figure out how to turn it back on. Whether or not these resets happen, and which settings they affect, seems pretty random. I've started a thread for discussing them.


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## wrmcpherson (5 mo ago)

Ed Woodrick said:


> Did you click the map and then make sure that the traffic was turned on? I know that it has disappeared for me once or twice, easily just turned back on.
> 
> Not really understanding what a link to an online station when signals get weak is, have you tried adding one back? (I'm not sure why a link to an online station would help a cellular signal getting weak means)


Thanks. Those suggestions worked to restore what was on the screen before. The question is, why did the software update remove them?


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## Ed Woodrick (May 26, 2018)

wrmcpherson said:


> Thanks. Those suggestions worked to restore what was on the screen before. The question is, why did the software update remove them?


Just a bug in the software.


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## DocScott (Mar 6, 2019)

Not a bug in the software itself, I think; at least not in the sense of the specific firmware versions.

My hypothesis is that the process of updating sometimes doesn't manage to copy over all the old settings correctly. It has nothing to do with specific features of the old firmware or the new firmware; it's the installer that messes up.

I suspect it wouldn't be reproducible; take the same car, with the same firmware, and update it once and it might happen; revert it to the previous firmware and update it again and it might not. Of course, us owners have no way to test that, because we can't choose to revert to an earlier version. But Tesla could try that if they wanted to.


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## Ed Woodrick (May 26, 2018)

DocScott said:


> Not a bug in the software itself, I think; at least not in the sense of the specific firmware versions.
> 
> My hypothesis is that the process of updating sometimes doesn't manage to copy over all the old settings correctly. It has nothing to do with specific features of the old firmware or the new firmware; it's the installer that messes up.


That's pretty much exactly what a bug is. If you did an update to Windows and your desktop background disappeared, wouldn't you call that a bug? And nothing about being a bug says that it has to be easily reproduceable. Again, take a look at Windows, most of the "bugs" that are reported only exist for a small number of users in very specific, commonly uncommon configurations.


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## DocScott (Mar 6, 2019)

Ed Woodrick said:


> That's pretty much exactly what a bug is. If you did an update to Windows and your desktop background disappeared, wouldn't you call that a bug? And nothing about being a bug says that it has to be easily reproduceable. Again, take a look at Windows, most of the "bugs" that are reported only exist for a small number of users in very specific, commonly uncommon configurations.


Huh.

No, in general I wouldn't call that a bug. I would call that a problem during installation. It's interesting that we use the term differently.


Ed Woodrick said:


> Again, take a look at Windows, most of the "bugs" that are reported only exist for a small number of users in very specific, commonly uncommon configurations.


That would still make it dependent on that configuration. And yes, I'd call that a bug.

I know there's been different opinions on whether that's what's happening with the issues that sometimes accompany Tesla firmware updates or not. Some people insist that when something goes wrong during installation, it must be a bug that would only affect people with cars with that exact set of hardware, settings, etc.. 

But I think it's more like this:

Format a USB drive on your computer. Save a file to it. Open the file. Reformat the drive. Keep repeating that.

Once in a while, the file won't save right. 

That's not because of some very specific configuration...nothing has changed on your computer! It's just because hardware is imperfect, and sometimes something goes wrong. (Again, I wouldn't call that a bug.)

It's true that good software is better at coping with those kinds of hardware hiccups. Well enough written software might detect that the file wasn't saving correctly, and re-save automatically. Or maybe the problem was when the drive was formatted, but again, software might detect that during formatting and reformat if necessary.

I say good software might do those things, but there are trade-offs: the more software tries to handle those eventualities, the slower it will be. And, ironically, it will be more prone to bugs because it's more complex!

Does it make a difference, or are we just arguing semantics?

I think it does make a difference. If the problem is a bug, then installing a _new_ firmware version might fix it. If the problem is something that goes wrong during installation, then reinstalling the _same_ firmware version might fix it. 

Tesla doesn't give us the option to reinstall the same firmware version ourselves. I understand why they don't; some users would try reinstalling over and over again, and use up a lot of bandwidth. But if they did, I think we could find out pretty quickly how frequently these issues are bugs, and how often they're installation problems


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## Kizzy (Jul 25, 2016)

DocScott said:


> Huh.
> 
> No, in general I wouldn't call that a bug. I would call that a problem during installation. It's interesting that we use the term differently.
> 
> ...


It could also be a bug in handling the updating of settings upon a software update to match the expected format. Subsequent installs of the same version wouldn’t necessarily have the same settings update taking place. Or maybe a bug in the updater fouls up over one step in a previous build, but doesn’t when that error state isn’t triggered. It can also work in reverse perhaps. A setting updater works flawlessly upon first install, but run it again on settings that have already been updated and something gets mucked up.

Hopefully, they’ve got most of this figured out and we’re not experiencing bugs from software that hasn’t had a robust development and error catching cycle. 🙃


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## SimonMatthews (Apr 20, 2018)

DocScott said:


> Format a USB drive on your computer. Save a file to it. Open the file. Reformat the drive. Keep repeating that.
> 
> Once in a while, the file won't save right.
> 
> That's not because of some very specific configuration...nothing has changed on your computer! It's just because hardware is imperfect, and sometimes something goes wrong. (Again, I wouldn't call that a bug.)


It really doesn't work like that, unless you are using very low quality USB drives. Modern hardware is remarkably reliable and has error checking and correction built in. SSDs eventually wear out, with thumb drives and SD drives having much lower endurance than devices such as SATA SSDs and M.2 drives. That's why I use a 100GB M.2 drive in a USB enclosure for my TeslaCam drive. Also, the larger the drive, the more data can be written and re-written to the drive before it wears out.


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## Ed Woodrick (May 26, 2018)

DocScott said:


> Huh.
> 
> No, in general I wouldn't call that a bug. I would call that a problem during installation. It's interesting that we use the term differently.
> 
> ...


Are you trying to say that the issue is because there was a memory fault? I'll say with 100% confidence that it wasn't a hardware problem.

I looked around for a definition of a bug and pretty much all of the results were "an error in software program" And that's exactly what it is. Whether it's the running code, the updater, or the boot loader, it's still a bug. In this case it's one of those bugs that goes mostly un-noticed, because most people would see that it is off and just turn it back on (thinking that they may have accidentally turned it off).

And along story shorter, the Microsoft Exchange team were having problems with their storage on SANs and number of years back. They's write something and every once in a while something would happen and customers would blame Exchange was at fault. After a lot of testing, they found that the SAN (which are hard drives with software in front of them) were lying, once in a couple trillion operations. They were able to definitively point determine that it was the SAN software causing the issues. (When they wrote directly to drivers, they didn't have the problems).
Well, it was bugs/errors in their software and drivers that was the problem. It wasn't a hardware problem, it was software.


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