Atmosphere/docs/changelog.md

Changelog

0.12.0

• Configuration for exosphere was moved to sd:/exosphere.ini.
  • This is to facilitate BIS protection changes described below.
  • Hopefully having this outside of the Atmosphere folder will prevent accidental deletion, since this now contains important settings.
• Atmosphere's bis protection policy for the PRODINFO partition was substantially reworked.
  • Support was added for "automatically" performing a "blanking" operation to PRODINFO without actually modifying NAND.
    • This is equivalent to using the "incognito" homebrew tool, but NAND is never actually modified.
    • This can be turned on in sysmmc by setting blank_prodinfo_sysmmc=1 in exosphere.ini, and in emummc by setting blank_prodinfo_emummc=1 in exosphere.ini.
    • Please note: This is not known to be safe. There is a lack of research on whether the information blanked out is cached elsewhere in the system.
      • Usage of this option is not encouraged for this reason.
  • Support was added for writing to the PRODINFO partition, if a verified encrypted backup has been made.
    • PRODINFO is the only system data that cannot be recovered if not backed up, and thus Atmosphere has backed it up to the SD card on boot for some time now.
    • Users who wish to modify their calibration data may now do so unconditionally in emummc, and in sysmmc if allow_writing_to_cal_sysmmc=1 is set in exosphere.ini.
      • Please note: This is heavily discouraged, and the typical user will almost never want to do this.
      • Setting this option will cause Atmosphere to attempt to verify (or create) an encrypted backup of the PRODINFO data to an unused region in the partition.
        • The backup is encrypted with per-console keys that Atmosphere's developers do not know.
      • If the backup is not verified or created, writes will not work. Users who have corrupted their PRODINFO in the past are encouraged to flash a good backup to allow use of this setting.
      • Reads and writes to the region used for the securely encrypted backup will appear to succeed, but will actually read/write from a buffer filled with garbage in memory.
  • Support will be investigated in the future for supporting booting with fully blanked calibration.
    • This is desirable to allow boot to succeed for users who lost their calibration data due to bricking homebrew before bis protection was implemented.
• creport has been updated to use the new screenshot APIs added in 9.0.0+.
  • On 10.0.0+, if a crash occurs in an application (not applet or sysmodule) a screenshot will now be automatically saved to the SD card.
  • If the user applies a patch to vi on 9.0.0 (as the command this uses was previously for dev-units only), this can also work on 9.0.0.
• The new sysmodule pgl added in 10.0.0 was reimplemented.
  • pgl ("Program Launcher", probably) is responsible for managing launched user-processes, previously this was handled by NS.
  • The most exciting thing about pgl is that it finally provides an API for multiple clients to subscribe to process events.
  • Using these new APIs, system modules / other homebrew can subscribe to be notified whenever a process event occurs.
    • This means action can be taken on process launch, process exit, process crash, etc.
  • A slight concern with Nintendo's implementation is that each subscriber object uses 0x448 bytes of memory, and N only reserves 8KB for all allocations in pgl.
  • Atmosphere's implementation uses a 32KB heap, which should not be exhaustible.
  • Atmosphere's implementation has a total memory footprint roughly 0x28000 bytes smaller than Nintendo's.
• A reimplementation was added for the jpegdec system module (thanks @HookedBehemoth)!
  • This allows two sessions instead of 1, so homebrew can now use it for software jpeg decoding in addition to the OS itself.
  • As usual the implementation has a very slightly smaller memory footprint than Nintendo's.
• A bug was fixed that would cause the console to crash when connected to Wi-Fi on versions between 3.0.0 and 4.1.0 inclusive.
• A bug was fixed that could cause boot to fail sporadically due to cache/tlb mismanagement when doing physical ASLR of the kernel.
• A number of other minor issues were addressed (and more of Atmosphere was updated to reflect other changes in 10.0.x).
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.11.1

• A bug was fixed that could cause owls to flicker under certain circumstances.
  • For those interested in technical details, in 10.0.0 kernelldr/kernel no longer set cpuactlr_el1, assuming that it was set correctly by the secure monitor.
  • However, exosphere did not set cpuactlr_el1. This meant that the register held the reset value going into boot.
  • This caused a variety of highly erratic symptoms, including causing basically any game to crash seemingly randomly.
• A number of other major inaccuracies in exosphere were corrected.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.11.0

• Support was added for 10.0.0.
  • Exosphere has been updated to reflect the new key import semantics in 10.0.0.
  • kernel_ldr now implements physical ASLR for the kernel's backing pages.
  • Loader, NCM, and PM have been updated to reflect the changes Nintendo made in 10.0.0.
  • Creport was updated to use the new pgl service to terminate processes instead of ns:dev.
• A reimplementation of the erpt (error reports) system module was added.
  • In previous versions of Atmosphere, a majority of error reports were prevented via a combination of custom creport, fatal, and stubbed eclct.
  • However, error reports were still generated via some system actions.
    • Most notably, any time the error applet appeared, an error report was generated.
    • By default, atmosphere disabled the uploading of error reports, but going online in OFW after an error report occurred in Atmosphere could lead to undesirable telemetry.
  • Atmosphere's erpt reimplementation allows the system to interact with existing error reports as expected.
  • However, all new error reports are instead saved to the sd card (/atmosphere/erpt_reports), and are not committed to the system savegame.
    • Users curious about what kind of telemetry is being prevented can view the reports as they're generated in there.
    • Reports are saved as msgpack (as this is what Nintendo uses).
  • Please note, not all telemetry is disabled. Play reports and System reports will continue to function unmodified.
  • With atmosphere's erpt implementation, homebrew can now use the native error applet to display errors without worrying about generating undesirable telemetry.
• libstratosphere and libvapours received a number of improvements.
  • With thanks to @Adubbz for his work, the NCM namespace now has client code.
    • This lays the groundwork for first-class system update/downgrade homebrew support in the near future.
  • In particular, code implementing the os namespace is significantly more accurate.
  • In addition, Nintendo's allocators were implemented, allowing for identical memory efficiency versus Nintendo's implementations.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.10.5

• Changes were made to the way fs.mitm builds images when providing a layeredfs romfs.
  • Building romfs metadata previously had a memory cost of about ~4-5x the file table size.
  • This caused games that have particularly enormous file metadata tables (> 4 MB) to exhaust fs.mitm's 16 MB memory pool.
  • The code that creates romfs images was thus changed to be significantly more memory efficient, again.
  • Memory requirements have been lowered from ~4x file table size to ~2x file table size + 0.5 MB.
  • There is a slight speed penalty to this, but testing on Football Manager 2020 only took an extra ~1.5 seconds for the game to boot with many modded files.
    • This shouldn't be noticeable thanks to the async changes made in 0.10.2.
  • If you encounter a game that exhausts ams.mitm's memory (crashing it) when loading layeredfs mods, please contact SciresM.
    • Romfs building can be made even more memory efficient, but unless games show up with even more absurdly huge file tables it seems not worth the speed trade-off.
• A bug was fixed that caused Atmosphere's fatal error context to not dump TLS for certain processes.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.10.4

• With major thanks to @Adubbz for his work, the NCM system module has now been re-implemented.
  • This was a major stepping stone towards the goal of having implementations everything in the Switch's package1/package2 firmware.
  • This also lays the groundwork for libstratosphere providing bindings for changing the installed version of the Switch's OS.
  • Please Note: The NCM implementation will initially be opt-in.
    • The Atmosphere team is confident in our NCM implementation (and we have tested it on every firmware version).
    • That said, this is our first system module that manages NAND savegames -- and caution is a habit.
    • We do not anticipate any issues that didn't come up in testing, so this is just our being particularly careful.
    • Users interested in opting in to using our implementation should set stratosphere!ncm_enabled = 1 in BCT.ini.
      • In the unlikely event that any issues are encountered, please report them to @SciresM.
    • The NCM implementation will stop being opt-in in a future update, after thorough testing has been done in practice.
• A bug was fixed in emummc that caused Nintendo path to be corrupted on 1.0.0.
  • This manifested as the emummc folder being created inside the virtual NAND instead of the SD card.
  • It's unlikely there are any negative consequences to this in practice.
    • If you want to be truly sure, you can re-clone sysmmc before updating a 1.0.0 emummc to latest firmware.
• Stratosphere system modules now use new Nintendo-style FS bindings instead of stdio.
  • This saves a modest amount of memory due to leaner code, and greatly increases the accuracy of several components.
  • These bindings will make it easier for other system modules using libstratosphere to interact with the filesystem.
  • This also lays the groundwork for changes necessary to support per-emummc Atmosphere folders in a future update.
• Atmosphere's fatal error context now dumps 0x100 of TLS.
  • This will make it much easier to fix bugs when an error report is dumped for whatever caused the crash.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.10.3

• Support was added for 9.2.0.
• Support was added for redirecting manual html content for games.
  • This works like normal layeredfs, replacing content placed in /atmosphere/contents/<program id>/manual_html/.
  • This allows for game mods/translations to provide custom manual content, if they so choose.
• A number of improvements were made to Atmosphere's memory usage, including:
  • fatal now uses STB instead of freetype for rendering.
    • This saves around 1 MB of memory, and makes our fatal substantially leaner than Nintendo's.
  • sm no longer wastes 2 MiB unnecessarily.
• fusee/sept's sdmmc access now better matches official behavior.
  • This improves compatibility with some SD cards.
• ro has been updated to reflect changes made in 9.1.0.
• The temporary auto-migration added in 0.10.0 has been removed, since the transitionary period is well over.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.10.2

• hbl configuration was made more flexible.
  • Up to eight specific program ids can now be specified to have their own override keys.
  • This allows designating both the album applet and a specific game as hbl by default as desired.
  • Configuration targeting a specific program is now mutually exclusive with override-any-app for that program.
    • This fixes unintuitive behavior when override key differed for an application specific program.
• Loader's external content fileystem support was fixed (thanks @misson20000!).
• KernelLdr was reimplemented.
  • This is the first step towards developing mesosphere, Atmosphere's planned reimplementation of the Switch's Kernel.
  • The typical user won't notice anything different, as there are no extensions, but a lot of groundwork was laid for future development.
• Improvements were made to the way Atmosphere's buildsystem detects source code files.
  • This significantly reduces compilation time (saving >30 seconds) on the machine that builds official releases.
• Certain device code was cleaned up and made more correct in fusee/sept/exosphere (thanks @hexkyz!).
• A number of changes were made to the way fs.mitm builds images when providing a layeredfs romfs.
  • Some games (Resident Evil 6, Football Manager 2020 Touch, possibly others) have enormous numbers of files.
  • Attempting to create a layeredfs mod for these games actually caused fs.mitm to run out of memory, causing a fatal error.
  • The code that creates these images was changed to be significantly more memory efficient.
  • However, these changes also cause a significant slowdown in the romfs building code (~2-5x).
  • This introduced a noticeable stutter when launching a game, because the UI thread would block on the romfs creation.
  • To solve this, fs.mitm now lazily initializes the image in a background thread.
  • This fixes stutter issues, however some games may be slightly slower (~1-2s in the worst cases) to transition from the "loading" GIF to gameplay now.
    • Please note: the slowdown is not noticeable in the common case where games don't have tons of files (typical is ~0.1-0.2 seconds).
    • Once the image has been built, there is no further speed penalty at runtime -- only when the game is launched.
• A number of other bugs were fixed, including:
  • Several minor logic inversions that could have caused fatal errors when modding games.
  • Atmosphere's new-ipc code did not handle "automatic" recvlist buffers correctly, so some non-libnx homebrew could crash.
  • fs.mitm now correctly mitms sdb, which makes redirection of certain system data archives work again.
    • In 0.10.0/0.10.1, changing the system font/language did not work correctly due to this.
  • A bug was fixed in process cleanup that caused the system to hang on < 5.0.0.
• The temporary hid-mitm added in Atmosphere 0.9.0 was disabled by default.
  • Please ensure your homebrew is updated.
  • For now, users may re-enable this mitm by use of a custom setting (atmosphere!enable_deprecated_hid_mitm) to ease the transition process some.
  • Please note: support for this setting may be removed to save memory in a future atmosphere release.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.10.1

• A bug was fixed that caused memory reallocation to the system pool to work improperly on firmware 5.0.0 and above.
  • Atmosphere was always trying to deallocate memory away from the applet pool and towards the system pool.
    • The intent of this is to facilitate running more custom sysmodules/atmosphere binaries.
  • However, while memory was always successfully taken away from the applet pool, on 5.0.0+ granting it to the system pool did not work for technical reasons.
    • If you are interested in the technical details, talk to SciresM.
  • This has now been fixed by adding new kernel patches, and memory is correctly granted to the system pool as intended.
• Atmosphere's library system has been overhauled:
  • libstratosphere's repository has been rebranded, more generally, to "Atmosphere-libs".
    • In addition to libstratosphere, a new general library for not-stratosphere-specific code has been added.
      • This is currently named libvapours.
    • In the future, kernel functionality will be available as libmesosphere.
  • The build system for stratosphere system modules has been similarly overhauled.
• A number of other bugs were fixed, including:
  • A bug was fixed that could cause memory corruption when redirecting certain Romfs content.
  • A bug was fixed that could cause an infinite loop when redirecting certain Romfs content.
  • A bug was fixed that could cause certain NROs to fail to load.
    • This caused the latest version of Super Smash Bros to display "An error has occurred" on launch.
  • A bug was fixed that caused input/output array sizes for certain circumstances to be calculated incorrectly.
    • This caused cheats to fail to function properly.
  • C++ exception code is now more thoroughly removed from stratosphere executables.
    • This saves a minor amount of memory.
  • A number of minor logic inversions were fixed in libstratosphere.
    • These did not affect any code currently used by released Atmosphere binaries.
• Please note*: Because this update is releasing so soon after 0.10.0, the removal of the temporary hid-mitm has been postponed to 0.10.2.
  • Please ensure your homebrew is updated.
• Random number generation now uses TinyMT instead of XorShift.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.10.0

• Support was added for 9.1.0
  • Please note: The temporary hid-mitm added in Atmosphere 0.9.0 will be removed in Atmosphere 0.10.1.
    • Please ensure your homebrew is updated.
• The Stratosphere rewrite was completed.
  • libstratosphere was rewritten as part of Stratosphere's refactor.
    • Code responsible for providing and managing IPC services was greatly improved.
      • The new code is significantly more accurate (it is bug-for-bug compatible with Nintendo's code), and significantly faster.
  • ams.mitm was rewritten as part of Stratosphere's refactor.
    • Saves redirected to the SD card are now separated for sysmmc vs emummc.
    • Please note: If you find any bugs, please report them so they can be fixed.
• Thanks to the rewrite, Atmosphere now uses significantly less memory.
  • Roughly 10 additional megabytes are now available for custom system modules to use.
  • This means you can potentially run more custom system modules simultaneously.
    • If system modules are incompatible, please ask their authors to reduce their memory footprints.
• Atmosphere's configuration layout has had major changes.
  • Configuration now lives inside /atmosphere/config/.
  • Atmosphere code now knows what default values should be, and includes them in code.
    • It is no longer an error if configuration inis are not present.
  • Correspondingly, Atmosphere no longer distributes default configuration inis.
    • Templates are provided in /atmosphere/config_templates.
  • loader.ini was renamed to override_config.ini.
  • This fixes the longstanding problem that atmosphere updates overwrote user configuration when extracted.
• Atmosphere's process override layout was changed.
  • Atmosphere now uses the /atmosphere/contents directory, instead of /atmosphere/titles.
    • This goes along with a refactoring to remove all reference to "title id" from code, as Nintendo does not use the term.
  • To make this transition easier, a temporary functionality has been added that migrates folders to the new directory.
    • When booting into 0.10.0, Atmosphere will rename /atmosphere/titles/<program id> to /atmosphere/contents/<program id>.
      • This functionality may or may not be removed in some future update.
    • This should solve any transition difficulties for the typical user.
    • Please make sure that any future mods you install extract to the correct directory.
• Support for configuring override keys for hbl was improved.
  • The key used to override applications versus a specific program can now be different.
    • The key to override a specific program can be managed via override_key.
    • The key to override any app can be managed via override_any_app_key.
  • Default override behavior was changed.
    • By default, atmosphere will now override the album applet with hbl unless R is held.
    • By default, atmosphere will now override any application with hbl only if R is held.
• The default amount of applet memory reserved has been slightly increased.
  • This allows the profile selector applet to work by default in applet mode.
• The way process override status is captured was changed.
  • Process override keys are now captured exactly once, when the process is created.
    • This fixes the longstanding issue where letting go of the override button partway into the process launch could cause problems.
  • The Mitm API was changed to pass around override status.
    • Mitm services now know what keys were held when the client was created, as well as whether the client is HBL/should override contents.
  • An extension was added to pm:info to allow querying a process's override status.
• Thanks to process override capture improvements, hbl html behavior has been greatly improved.
  • Web applets launched by hbl will now always see the /atmosphere/hbl_html filesystem
• Support was added to exosphere for enabling usermode access to the PMU registers.
  • This can be controlled via exosphere!enable_user_pmu_access in BCT.ini.
• An enormous number of minor bugs were fixed.
  • dmnt's cheat VM had a fix for an inversion in opcode behavior.
  • An issue was fixed in fs.mitm's management of domain object IDs that could lead to system corruption in rare cases.
  • The Mitm API no longer silently fails when attempting to handle commands passing C descriptors.
    • On previous atmosphere versions, certain commands to FS would silently fail due to this...
      • No users reported any visible errors, but it was definitely a problem behind the scenes.
    • These commands are now handled correctly.
  • Atmosphere can now display a fatal error screen significantly earlier in the boot process, if things go wrong early on.
  • The temporary hid mitm will no longer sometimes cause games to fail to detect input.
  • Mitm Domain object ID management no longer desynchronizes from the host process.
  • An issue was fixed that could cause service acquisition to hang forever if certain sm commands were called in a precise order.
  • An off-by-one was fixed that could cause memory corruption in server memory management.
  • ... and too many more bugs fixed to reasonably list them all :)
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.9.4

• Support was added for 9.0.0.
  • Please note: 9.0.0 made a number of changes that may cause some issues with homebrew. Details:
  • 9.0.0 changed HID in a way that causes libnx to be unable to detect button input.
    • Homebrew should be recompiled with newest libnx to fix this.
    • Atmosphere now provides a temporary hid-mitm that will cause homebrew to continue to work as expected.
      • This mitm will be removed in a future Atmosphere revision once homebrew has been updated, to allow users to use a custom hid mitm again if they desire.
  • 9.0.0 introduced an dependency in FS on the USB system module in order to launch the SD card.
    • This means the USB system module must now be launched before the SD card is initialized.
    • Correspondingly, the USB system module can no longer be IPS patched, and its settings cannot be reliably mitm'd.
    • We know this is frustrating, so we'll be looking into whether there is some way of addressing this in the future.
• An off-by-one error was fixed in boot system module's pinmux initialization.
  • This could theoretically have caused issues with HdmiCec communication.
  • No users reported issues, so it's unclear if this was a problem in practice.
• A bug was fixed that could cause webapplet launching homebrew to improperly set the accessible url whitelist.
• BIS key generation has been fixed for newer hardware.
  • Newer hardware uses new, per-firmware device key to generate BIS keys instead of the first device key, so previously the wrong keys were generated as backup.
  • This only affects units manufactured after ~5.0.0.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.9.3

• Thanks to hexkyz, fusee's boot sequence has been greatly optimized.
  • Memory training is now managed by a separate binary (fusee-mtc, loaded by fusee-primary before fusee-secondary).
  • Unnecessarily long splash screen display times were reduced.
  • The end result is that Atmosphere now boots significantly faster. :)
  • Note: This means fusee-primary must be updated for Atmosphere to boot successfully.
• The version string was adjusted, and now informs users whether or not they are using emummc.
• Atmosphere now automatically backs up the user's BIS keys on boot.
  • This should prevent a user from corrupting nand without access to a copy of the keys needed to fix it.
    • This is especially relevant on ipatched units, where the RCM vulnerability is not an option for addressing bricks.
• The pm system module was rewritten as part of Stratosphere's ongoing refactor.
  • Support was added for forward-declaring a mitm'd service before a custom user sysmodule is launched.
    • This should help resolve dependency issues with service registration times.
  • SM is now informed of every process's title id, including built-in system modules.
• The creport system module was rewritten as part of Stratosphere's ongoing refactor.
  • creport now dumps up to 0x100 of stack from each thread in the target process.
  • A few bugs were fixed, including one that caused creport to incorrectly dump process dying messages.
• Defaults were added to system_settings.ini for controlling hbloader's memory usage in applet mode.
  • These defaults reserve enough memory so that homebrew can launch swkbd while in applet mode.
• The fatal system module was rewritten as part of Stratosphere's ongoing refactor.
  • Incorrect display output ("2000-0000") has been fixed. Fatal will now correctly show 2162-0002 when this occurs.
  • A longstanding bug in how fatal manages the displays has been fixed, and official display init behavior is now matched precisely.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.9.2

• A number of emummc bugfixes were added (all thanks to @m4xw's hard work). The following is a summary of emummc changes:
  • Support for file-based emummc instances was fixed.
    • Please note: file-based emummc is still unoptimized, and so may be much slower than partition-based.
    • This speed differential should hopefully be made better in a future emummc update.
  • The way emummc handles power management was completely overhauled.
    • Emummc now properly handles init/de-init, and now supports low voltage mode.
    • Much better support for shutdown was added, which should assuage corruption/synchronization problems.
    • This should also improve support for more types of SD cards.
  • A bug was fixed that caused emummc to not work on lower system versions due to missing SVC access.
  • Please note: The configuration entries used for emummc have been changed.
    • emummc_ prefixes have been removed, since they are superfluous given the emummc category they are under.
    • As an example, emummc!emummc_enabled is now emummc!enabled.
    • INI configurations made by @CTCaer's tool (which is the recommended way to manage emummc) should automatically work as expected/be corrected.
      • If you do not wish to use the above, you will need to manually correct your configuration file.
  • General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.
• Stratosphere is currently in the process of being re-written/refactored.
  • Stratosphere was my (SciresM's) first C++ project, ever -- the code written for it a year ago when I was learning C++ is/was of much lower quality than code written more recently.
  • Code is thus being re-rwitten for clarity/stlye/to de-duplicate functionality, with much being moved into libstratosphere.
  • Stratosphere will, after the rewrite, globally use the sts:: namespace -- this should greatly enhancing libstratosphere's ability to provide functionality for system modules.
  • The rewritten modules consistently have lower memory footprints, and should be easier to maintain going forwards.
  • The sm, boot, spl, ro, and loader modules have been tackled so far.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.9.1

• Support was added for 8.1.0.
• Please note, emummc is still considered beta/experimental -- this is not the inevitable bugfix update for it, although some number of bugs have been fixed. :)
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.9.0

• Creport output was improved significantly.
  • Thread names are now dumped on crash in addition to 0x100 of TLS from each thread.
    • This significantly aids debugging efforts for crashes.
  • Support was added for 32-bit stackframes, so reports can now be generated for 32-bit games.
• dmnt's Cheat VM was extended to add a new debug opcode.
• With thanks to/collaboration with @m4xw and @CTCaer, support was added for redirecting NAND to the SD card (emummc).
  • Please note, this support is very much beta/experimental.
    • It is quite likely we have not identified all bugs -- those will be fixed as they are reported over the next few days/weeks.
    • In addition, some niceties (e.g. having a separate Atmosphere folder per emummc instance) still need some thought put in before they can be implemented in a way that makes everyone happy.
    • If you are not an advanced user, you may wish to think about waiting for the inevitable 0.9.1 bugfix update before using emummc as your default boot option.
      • You may especially wish to consider waiting if you are using Atmosphere on a unit with the RCM bug patched.
  • Emummc is managed by editing the emummc section of "emummc/emummc.ini".
    • To enable emummc, set emummc!emummc_enabled = 1.
  • Support is included for redirecting NAND to a partition on the SD card.
    • This can be done by setting emummc!emummc_sector to the start sector of your partition (e.g., emummc_sector = 0x1A010000).
  • Support is also included for redirecting NAND to a collection of loose files on the SD card.
    • This can be done by setting emummc!emummc_path to the folder (with archive bit set) containing the NAND boot partitions' files "boot0" and "boot1", and the raw NAND image files "00", "01", "02", etc. (single "00" file with the whole NAND image requires exFAT mode while multipart NAND can be used in both exFAT and FAT32 modes).
  • The Nintendo contents directory can be redirected arbitrarily.
    • By default, it will be redirected to emummc/Nintendo_XXXX, where XXXX is the hexadecimal representation of the emummc's ID.
      • The current emummc ID may be selected by changing emummc!emummc_id in emummc.ini.
    • This can be set to any arbitrary directory by setting emummc!emummc_nintendo_path.
  • To create a backup usable for emummc, users may use tools provided by the hekate project.
  • If, when using emummc, you encounter a bug, please be sure to report it -- that's the only way we can fix it. :)

0.8.10

• A bug was fixed that could cause incorrect system memory allocation on 5.0.0.
  • 5.0.0 should now correctly have an additional 12 MiB allocated for sysmodules.
• Atmosphère features which check button presses now consider all controllers, isntead of just P1.
• Support was added for configuring language/region on a per-game basis.
  • This is managed by editing atmosphere/titles/<title id>/config.ini for the game.
  • To edit title language, edit override_config!override_language.
    • The languages supported are ja, en-US, fr, de, it, es, zh-CN, ko, nl, pt, ru, zh-TW, en-GB, fr-CA, es-419, zh-Hans, zh-Hant.
  • To edit title region, edit override_config!override_region.
    • The regions supported are jpn, usa, eur, aus, chn, kor, twn.
• Atmosphère now provides a reimplementation of the boot system module.
  • boot is responsible for performing hardware initialization, showing the Nintendo logo, and repairing NAND on system update failure.
  • Atmosphère's boot implementation preserves AutoRCM during NAND repair.
    • NAND repair occurs when an unexpected shutdown or error happens during a system update.
    • This fixes a final edge case where AutoRCM might be removed by HOS, which could cause a user to burn fuses.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.9

• A number of bugs were fixed, including:
  • A data abort was fixed when mounting certain partitions on NAND.
  • All Stratosphère system modules now only maintain a connection to sm when actively using it.
    • This helps mitigate the scenario where sm hits the limit of 64 active connections and crashes.
    • This sometimes caused crashes when custom non-Atmosphère sysmodules were active and the user played certain games (ex: Smash's Stage Builder).
  • fatal now uses the 8.0.0 clkrst API, instead of silently failing to adjust clock rates on that firmware version.
  • A wait loop is now performed when trying to get a session to sm, in the case where sm: is not yet registered.
    • This fixes a race condition that could cause a failure to boot under certain circumstances.
  • libstratosphere's handling of domain object closing has been improved.
    • Previously, this code could cause crashes/extremely odd behavior (misinterpreting what object a service is) under certain circumstances.
• An optional automatic reboot timer was added to fatal.
  • By setting the system setting atmosphere!fatal_auto_reboot_interval to a non-zero u64 value, fatal can be made to automatically reboot after a certain number of milliseconds.
  • If the setting is zero or not present, fatal will wait for user input as usual.
• Atmosphère now provides a reimplementation of the ro system module.
  • ro is responsible for loading dynamic libraries (NROs) on 3.0.0+.
    • On 1.0.0-2.3.0, this is handled by loader.
  • Atmosphere's ro provides this functionality (ldr:ro, ro:dmnt) on all firmware versions.
  • An extension was implemented to provide support for applying IPS patches to NROs.
    • All patches at paths like /atmosphere/nro_patches//.ips will be applied, allowing for easy distribution of patches.
    • Both the IPS and IPS32 formats are supported.
• Atmosphère now provides a reimplementation of the spl system module.
  • spl (Secure Platform Services) is responsible for cryptographic operations, including all communications with the secure monitor (exosphère).
  • In the future, this may be used to provide extensions to the API for interacting with exosphère from userland.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.8

• Support was added for firmware version 8.0.0.
• Custom exception handlers were added to stratosphere modules.
  • If a crash happens in a core atmosphere module now, instead of silently failing a reboot will occur to log the information to the SD card.
• A bug was fixed in creport that caused games to hang when crashing under certain circumstances.
• A bug was fixed that prevented maintenance mode from booting on 7.0.0+.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.7

• A few bugs were fixed that could cause fatal to fail to show an error under certain circumstances.
• A bug was fixed that caused an error when launching certain games (e.g. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice).
  • Loader had support added in ams-0.8.4 for a new (7.0.0+) flag bit in NPDMs during process creation, but forgot to allow this bit to be set when validating the NPDM.
• dmnt's cheat virtual machine received new instructions.
  • These allow for saving, restoring, or clearing registers to a secondary bank, effectively doubling the number of values that can be stored.
• SHA256 code has been swapped from linux code to libnx's new hw-accelerated cryptography API.
• Extensions were added to smcGetInfo:
  • A ConfigItem was added to detect whether the current unit has the RCM bug patched.
  • A ConfigItem was added to retrieve the current Atmosphère build hash.
• Exosphère now tells the kernel to enable user-mode exception handlers, which should allow for better crash reporting/detection from Atmosphère's modules in the future..
• Opt-in support was added for redirecting game save files to directories on the SD card.
  • Please note, this feature is experimental, and may cause problems. Please use at your own risk (and back up your saves before enabling it), as it still needs testing.
  • This can be enabled by setting atmosphere!fsmitm_redirect_saves_to_sd to 1 in system_settings.ini.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.6

• A number of bugs were fixed, including:
  • A case of inverted logic was fixed in fs.mitm which prevented the flags system from working correctly.
  • Time service access was corrected in both creport/fatal.
    • This fixes the timestamps used in fatal/crash report filenames.
  • A coherency issue was fixed in exosphère's Security Engine driver.
    • This fixes some instability issues encountered when overclocking the CPU.
  • Loader now unmaps NROs correctly, when ldr:ro is used.
    • This fixes a crash when repeatedly launching the web applet on < 3.0.0.
  • Usage of hidKeysDown was corrected to hidKeysHeld in several modules.
    • This fixes a rare issue where keypresses may have been incorrectly detected.
  • An issue with code filesystem unmounting was fixed in loader.
    • This issue could occasionally cause a fatal error 0x1015 to be thrown on boot.
  • Two bugs were fixed in the implementations of dmnt's cheat virtual machine.
    • These could cause cheats to work incorrectly under certain circumstances.
  • PM now uses a static buffer instead of a dynamically allocated one during process launch.
    • This fixes a memory exhaustion problem when building with gcc 8.3.0.
  • A workaround for a deadlock bug in Horizon's kernel on >= 6.0.0 was added in dmnt.
    • This prevents a system hang when booting certain titles with cheats enabled (ex: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe).
  • set.mitm now reads the system firmware version directly from the system version archive, instead of calling into set:sys.
    • This fixes compatibility with 1.0.0, which now successfully boots again.
• dmnt's cheat virtual machine had some instruction set changes.
  • A new opcode was added for beginning conditional blocks based on register contents.
  • More addressing modes were added to the StoreRegisterToAddress opcode.
  • These should allow for more complex cheats to be implemented.
• A new system for saving the state of cheat toggles between game boots was added.
  • Toggles are now saved to atmosphere/titles/<title id>/cheats/toggles.txt when either toggles were successfully loaded from that file or the system setting atmosphere!dmnt_always_save_cheat_toggles is non-zero.
  • This removes the need for manually setting cheats from all-on or all-off to the desired state on each game boot.
• The default behavior for loader's HBL support was changed.
  • Instead of launching HBL when album is launched without R held, loader now launches HBL when album or any game is launched with R held.
  • Loader will now override any app in addition to a specific title id when hbl_config!override_any_app is true in loader.ini.
    • Accordingly, the hbl_config!title_id=app setting was deprecated. Support will be removed in Atmosphère 0.9.0.
• First-class support was added to loader and fs.mitm for enabling homebrew to launch web applets.
  • Loader will now cause the "HtmlDocument" NCA path to resolve for whatever title HBL is taking over, even if it would not normally do so.
  • fs.mitm will also now cause requests to mount the HtmlDocument content for HBL's title to open the sdmc:/atmosphere/hbl_html folder.
    • By default, this just contains a URL whitelist.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.5

• Support was added for overriding content on a per-title basis, separate from HBL override.
  • This allows for using mods on the same title that one uses to launch HBL.
  • By default, !L is used for title content override (this is configurable by editing default_config!override_key in loader.ini)
  • This key combination can be set on a per-title basis by creating a atmosphere/titles/<title id>/config.ini, and editing override_config!override_key.
• Content headers were added for the embedded files inside of fusee-secondary.
  • This will allow non-fusee bootloaders (like hekate) to extract the components bundled inside release binaries.
  • This should greatly simplify the update process in the future, for users who do not launch Atmosphère using fusee.
• Support for cheat codes was added.
  • These are handled by a new dmnt sysmodule, which will also reimplement Nintendo's Debug Monitor in the future.
  • Cheat codes can be enabled/disabled at application launch via a per-title key combination.
    • For details, please see the cheat loading documentation.
  • Cheat codes are fully backwards compatible with the pre-existing format, although a number of bugs have been fixed and some new features have been added.
    • For details, please see the compatibility documentation.
  • An HIPC service API was added (dmnt:cht), that will allow user homebrew to interface with and control Atmosphère's cheat manager.
    • Please see the relevant documentation.
    • Full client code can be found in libstratosphere.
    • Users interested in interfacing should see EdiZon, which should have support for interfacing with Atmosphère's API shortly after 0.8.5 releases.
• A bug was fixed that would cause Atmosphère's fatal screen to not show on 1.0.0-2.3.0.
• A bug was fixed that caused Atmosphère's automatic ProdInfo backups to be corrupt.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.4

• Support for 7.0.0/7.0.1 was added.
  • This is facilitated through a new payload, sept, which can be signed, encrypted, and then loaded by Nintendo's TSEC firmware.
  • sept will derive the keys needed to boot new firmware, and then load sept/payload.bin off the SD card and jump to it.
• Recognition of applications for override/mitm has been improved.
  • Nintendo's official Title ID range (0x0100000000000000-0x01FFFFFFFFFFFFFF) is now enforced.
• A deadlock condition was fixed involving libstratosphere mitm sysmodules.
• Kernel patches for JIT support were added (Thanks, @m4xw!).
  • These loosen restrictions on caller process in svcControlCodeMemory.
• set.mitm and fs.mitm were merged into a single ams_mitm sysmodule.
  • This saves a process ID, allowing users to run one additional process up to the 0x40 process limit.
• A bpc.mitm component was added, performing custom behavior on shutdown/reboot requests from am or applications.
  • Performing a reboot from the reboot menu now reboots to atmosphere. This can be configured via system_settings.ini.
  • Performing a shutdown from the reboot menu now works properly with AutoRCM, and does a real shutdown.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.3

• A custom warmboot firmware was implemented, which does not perform anti-downgrade fuse checks.
  • This fixes sleep mode when using a downgraded NAND.
  • This also removes Atmosphère's final dependency on Nintendo's encrypted PK11 binary; all components are now re-implemented.
• The ExternalContentSource API was changed to not clear on failure.
• Content override now supports an "app" setting, that causes all applications to be overridden with HBL instead of a specific title.
  • Note: because override keys are system-wide, using this setting will prevent using mods in games (as every game will be HBL).
• A bug was fixed causing incorrect fatal-error output when svcBreak was called on 5.0.0+.
• An extension was added to set.mitm to support customization of system settings.
  • These are controlled by atmosphere/system_settings.ini, see here for documentation.
• An extension was added to sm, adding a new sm:dmnt service.
  • This can be used by a debug monitor in order to debug the registration state of various other services.
• A bug was fixed in the MitM API that could sometimes cause a system hang during boot.
• A change was made to the MitM API: in cases where sm would have returned 0xE15 when installing a mitm service, it now defers the result (following GetService semantics).
• Support for booting into maintenance mode by holding +/- was added to PM.
• An extension was added to exosphere, adding a custom SMC that allows for DMA to IRAM.
• In addition, smcGetConfig was extended to reboot to a payload in IRAM at 0x40010000 when ConfigItem 65001 is set to 2.
  • Fatal will now use this to reboot to sdmc:/atmosphere/reboot_payload.bin if present, when a vol button is pressed.
  • An example homebrew ("reboot_to_payload") was also written and is now included with Atmosphère.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.2

• A number of bugs were fixed causing users to sometimes see Key Derivation Failed!.
  • KFUSE clock enable timings have been adjusted to allow time to stabilize before TSEC is granted access.
  • A race condition was fixed that could cause wrong key data to be used on 6.2.0
  • The TSEC firmware is now retried on failure, fixing a failure affecting ~1/50 boots on 6.2.0.
• A bug was fixed causing some modules to not work on firmware 1.0.0.
• A bug was fixed causing sleep mode to not work with debugmode enabled.
  • As a result, debugmode is now enabled in the default BCT.ini.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.1

• A bug was fixed causing users to see Failed to enable SMMU! if fusee had previously rebooted.
  • This message will still occur sporadically if fusee is not launched from coldboot, but it can never happen twice in a row.
• A race condition was fixed in Atmosphere bis_protect functionality that could cause NS to be able to overwrite BCT public keys.
  • This sometimes broke AutoRCM protection, the current fix has been tested on hardware and verified to work.
• Support was added for enabling debugmode based on the exosphere section of BCT.ini:
  • Setting debugmode = 1 will cause exosphere to tell the kernel that debugmode is active.
  • Setting debugmode_user = 1 will cause exosphere to tell userland that debugmode is active.
  • These are completely independent of one another, allowing fine control of system behavior.
• Support was added for nogc functionality; thanks to @rajkosto for the patches.
  • By default, nogc patches will automatically apply if the user is booting into 4.0.0+ with fuses from <= 3.0.2.
  • Users can override this functionality via the nogc entry in the stratosphere section of BCT.ini:
    • Setting nogc = 1 will force enable nogc patches.
    • Setting nogc = 0 will force disable nogc patches.
  • If patches are enabled but not found for the booting system, a fatal error will be thrown.
    • This should prevent running FS without nogc patches after updating to an unsupported system version.
• An extension was added to exosphere allowing userland applications to cause the system to reboot into RCM:
  • This is done by calling smcSetConfig(id=65001, value=); user homebrew can use splSetConfig for this.
• On fatal error, the user can now choose to perform a standard reboot via the power button, or a reboot into RCM via either volume button.
• A custom message was added to fatal for when an Atmosphère API version mismatch is detected (2495-1623).
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.8.0

• A custom fatal system module was added.
  • This re-implements and extends Nintendo's fatal module, with the following features:
    • Atmosphère's fatal does not create error reports.
    • Atmosphère's fatal draws a custom error screen, showing registers and a backtrace.
    • Atmosphère's fatal attempts to gather debugging info for all crashes, and not just ones that include info.
    • Atmosphère's fatal will attempt saving reports to the SD, if a crash report was not generated by creport.
• Title flag handling was changed to prevent folder clutter.
  • Instead of living in atmosphere/titles/<tid>/%s.flag, flags are now located in atmosphere/titles/<tid>/flags/%s.flag
    • The old format will continue to be supported for some time, but is deprecated.
  • Flags can now be applied to HBL by placing them at atmosphere/flags/hbl_%s.flag.
• Changes were made to the mitm API, greatly improving caller semantics.
  • sm now informs mitm services of a new session's process id, enabling custom handling based on title id/process id.
• smhax is no longer enabled, because it is no longer needed and breaks significant functionality.
  • Users with updated HBL/homebrew should see no observable differences due to this change.
• Functionality was added implementing basic protections for NAND from userland homebrew:
  • BOOT0 now has write protection for the BCT public key and keyblob regions.
    • The ns sysmodule is no longer allowed to write the BCT public keys; all other processes can.
      • This should prevent system updates from removing AutoRCM.
    • No processes should be allowed to write to the keyblob region.
  • By default, BIS partitions other than BOOT0 are now read-only, and CAL0 is neither readable nor writable.
    • Adding a bis_write flag for a title will allow it to write to BIS.
    • Adding a cal_read flag for a title will allow it to read CAL0.
  • An automatic backup is now made of CAL0 on boot.
    • fs.mitm maintains a file handle to this backup, so userland software cannot read it.
  • To facilitate this, fs.mitm now mitms all sessions for non-system modules; content overriding has been made separate from service interception.
  • Please note: these protections are basic, and sufficiently malicious homebrew ++can defeat them++.
    • Please be careful to only run homebrew software from sources that you trust.
• A bug involving HDCP titles crashing on newer firmwares was fixed.
• Support was added for system version 6.2.0; our thanks to @motezazer for his invaluable help.
  • By default, new keys will automatically be derived without user input.
  • Support is also present for loading new keys from atmosphere/prod.keys or atmosphere/dev.keys
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.7.5

• DRAM training was added to fusee-secondary, courtesy @hexkyz.
  • This greatly improves the speed of memory accesses during boot, resulting in a boot time that is ~200-400% faster.
• creport has had its code region detection improved.
  • Instead of only checking one of the crashing thread's PC/LR for code region presence, creport now checks both + every address in the stacktrace. This is also now done for every thread.
    • This matches the improvement Nintendo added to official creport in 6.1.0.
  • The code region detection heuristic was further improved by checking whether an address points to .rodata or .rwdata, instead of just .text.
  • This means that a crash appears in a loaded NRO (or otherwise discontiguous) code region, creport will be able to detect all active code regions, and not just that one.

0.7.4

• libstratosphere has been completely refactored/rewritten, and split into its own, separate submodule.
  • While this is mostly "under the hood" for end-users, the refactor is faster (improving both boot-time and runtime performance), more accurate (many of the internal IPC structures are now bug-for-bug compatible with Nintendo's implementations), and significantly more stable (it fixes a large number of bugs present in the old library).
  • The refactored API is significantly cleaner and easier to write system module code for, which should improve/speed up development of stratosphere.
  • Developers looking to write their own custom system modules for the Switch can now easily include libstratosphere as a submodule in their projects.
• Loader was extended to add a new generic way to redirect content (ExternalContentSources), courtesy @misson20000:
  • A new command was added to ldr:shel, taking in a tid to redirect and returning a session handle.
  • When the requested TID is loading, Loader will query the handle as though it were an IFileSystem.
    • This allows clients to generically define their own filesystems, and override content with them in loader.
• fs.mitm has gotten several optimizations that should improve its performance and stability:
  • RomFS redirection now only occurs when there is content to redirect, even if the title is being mitm'd elsewhere.
  • A cache is now maintained of the active data storage, if any, for all opened title IDs. This means if two processes both try to open the same archive, fs.mitm won't duplicate any of its work.
  • RomFS metadata is now cached to the SD card on build instead of being persisted in memory -- this greatly reduces memory footprint and allows fs.mitm to redirect more titles simultaneously than before.
• A number of bugs were fixed, including:
  • A resource leak was fixed in process creation. This fixes crashes that occur when a large number (>32) games have been launched since the last reboot.
  • fs.mitm no longer errors when receiving a zero-sized buffer. This fixes crashes in some games, including The Messenger.
  • Multi-threaded server semantics should no longer cause deadlocks in certain circumstances. This fixes crashes in some games, including NES Classics.
  • PM now only gives full FS permissions to the active KIPs. This fixes a potential crash where new processes might be unable to be registered with FS.
• The make dist target now includes the branch in the generated zip name.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.7.3

• Loader and fs.mitm now try to reload loader.ini before reading it. This allows for changing the override button combination/HBL title id at runtime.
• Added a MitM between set:sys and qlaunch, used to override the system version string displayed in system settings.
  • The displayed system version will now display <Actual version> (AMS <x>.<y>.<z>).
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.7.2

• Fixed a bug in fs.mitm's LayeredFS read implementation that caused some games to crash when trying to read files.
• Fixed a bug affecting 1.0.0 that caused games to crash with fatal error 2001-0106 on boot.
• Improved filenames output by the make dist target.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.7.1

• Fixed a bug preventing consoles on 4.0.0-4.1.0 from going to sleep and waking back up.
• Fixed a bug preventing consoles on < 4.0.0 from booting without specific KIPs on the SD card.
• An API was added to Atmosphère's Service Manager for deferring acquisition of all handles for specific services until after early initialization is completed.
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience.

0.7.0

• First official release of Atmosphère.
• Supports the following featureset:
  • Fusée, a custom bootloader.
    • Supports loading/customizing of arbitrary KIPs from the SD card.
    • Supports loading a custom kernel from the SD card ("/atmosphere/kernel.bin").
    • Supports compile-time defined kernel patches on a per-firmware basis.
    • All patches at paths like /atmosphere/kip_patches//.ips will be applied to the relevant KIPs, allowing for easy distribution of patches supporting multiple versions.
      • Both the IPS and IPS32 formats are supported.
    • All patches at paths like /atmosphere/kernel_patches//.ips will be applied to the kernel, allowing for easy distribution of patches supporting multiple versions.
      • Both the IPS and IPS32 formats are supported.
    • Configurable by editing BCT.ini on the SD card.
    • Atmosphère should also be launchable by the alternative hekate bootloader, for those who prefer it.
  • Exosphère, a fully-featured custom secure monitor.
    • Exosphere is a re-implementation of Nintendo's TrustZone firmware, fully replicating all of its features.
    • In addition, it has been extended to provide information on current Atmosphere API version, for homebrew wishing to make use of it.
  • Stratosphère, a set of custom system modules. This includes:
    • A loader system module.
      • Reimplementation of Nintendo's loader, fully replicating all original functionality.
      • Configurable by editing /atmosphere/loader.ini
      • First class support for the Homebrew Loader.
        • An exefs NSP (default "/atmosphere/hbl.nsp") will be used in place of the victim title's exefs.
        • By default, HBL will replace the album applet, but any application should also be supported.
      • Extended to support arbitrary redirection of executable content to the SD card.
        • Files will be preferentially loaded from /atmosphere/titles//exefs/, if present.
        • Files present in the original exefs a user wants to mark as not present may be "stubbed" by creating a .stub file on the SD.
        • If present, a PFS0 at /atmosphere/titles//exefs.nsp will fully replace the original exefs.
        • Redirection is optionally toggleable by holding down certain buttons (by default, holding R disables redirection).
      • Full support for patching NSO content is implemented.
        • All patches at paths like /atmosphere/exefs_patches//.ips will be applied, allowing for easy distribution of patches supporting multiple firmware versions and/or titles.
        • Both the IPS and IPS32 formats are supported.
      • Extended to support launching content from loose executable files on the SD card, without requiring any official installation.
        • This is done by specifying FsStorageId_None on launch.
    • A service manager system module.
      • Reimplementation of Nintendo's service manager, fully replicating all original functionality.
      • Compile-time support for reintroduction of "smhax", allowing clients to optionally skip service access verification by skipping initialization.
      • Extended to allow homebrew to acquire more handles to privileged services than Nintendo natively allows.
      • Extended to add a new API for installing Man-In-The-Middle listeners for arbitrary services.
        • API can additionally be used to safely detect whether a service has been registered in a non-blocking way with no side-effects.
        • Full API documentation to come.
    • A process manager system module.
      • Reimplementation of Nintendo's process manager, fully replicating all original functionality.
      • Extended to allow homebrew to acquire handles to arbitrary processes, and thus read/modify system memory without blocking execution.
      • Extended to allow homebrew to retrieve information about system resource limits.
      • Extended by embedding a full, extended implementation of Nintendo's boot2 system module.
        • Title launch order has been optimized in order to grant access to the SD card faster.
        • The error-collection system module is intentionally not launched, preventing many system telemetry error reports from being generated at all.
        • Users may place their own custom sysmodules on the SD card and flag them for automatic boot2 launch by creating a /atmosphere/titles/