To bring some closure here for any other parties that have been supporting ESP32 devices in the field since early v3 IDF, ultimately we were unable to discover the root cause of the bootloader-app incompatibility here, despite some efforts from ESP staff to help us out. For some context, we use a 3-...

FWIW we still face this issue in our fw on IDF v5.1.1

Are there any consultants out there who can help with this? I really think it has to do with "memw psram workaround" flags. DM me...

@ESP_Yake any tips here? Referring to the original screen captures of gdb, you can see that the `memw` instruction is sometimes present, sometimes absent. I guess we need to check the exact compile & link flags for all files, to make sure the PSRAM workaround with memw instructions is always flagged.

> Have you tried to upgrade the v5.1 firmware with the v3.2 boot? We can successfully boot the v5.1 app from v3.3.4 bootloader. We can use esptool to write just the boot partition and observe the issue occurring and not occurring based on using v3.1 or v3.3.4 bootloader. We don't have a v3.2 bootloa...

Thank you for reply, Yake. > Have you tested using v5.1.1 bootloader to load the firmware directly? I wonder if there is a problem at this time. What I have tried is using a more recent v3.x bootloader binary. Swapping just the bootloader binaries causes the problem to follow the bootloader binary. ...

We have many ESP32-WROVER-B (100k online, many more manufactured) with various revisions of IDF v3 bootloaders. We've been happily shipping firmware updates for ~5 years, all with IDF v3.x apps. We are now testing an IDF v5.x-based app, and sadly running into some bootloops which look like bootloade...

Espressif Support: We've got 5+ years of product in the field using ESP-WROVER-B. In that time, there have been changes to the RAM and/or Flash chips. I don't think there's been ESP32 chip revision change, but perhaps? Anyways, the issue is we are getting some reports of certain units in the field b...

Solved.

We had to change:
to
Seems there was some change in the exact interpretation of the authmode field.

We've got a situation where we are trying to upgrade our fleet from IDF 3.3.4 to 5.1.1. We are getting reports of failure to connect to WiFi after upgrade. We were able to reproduce in our lab with one TRENDnet TEW-711BR WiFi AP. Interestingly, our firmware successfully connects with IDF 3.3.4, but ...