Atmosphère 0.11.1

0.11.1 is Atmosphère's thirtieth official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.11.1.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.11.1 is bundled with hbl 2.3.1, and hbmenu 3.3.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.

The changelog for the previous release, 0.11.0 is as follows:

• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.11, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.11.0 (pre-release)

0.11.0 is Atmosphère's twenty-ninth official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.11.0.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.11.0 is bundled with hbl 2.3.1, and hbmenu 3.3.0.

Please note: Atmosphère 0.11.0 is currently in pre-release.

• If any bugs are reported while Atmosphère is in pre-release, they will be fixed and the build will be updated.
• 0.11.0 will transition to release after a short amount of time has passed without pressing bug reports.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.11, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.10.5

0.10.5 is Atmosphère's twenty-eighth official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.10.4.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.10.5 is bundled with hbl 2.3, and hbmenu 3.2.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.10, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.10.4

0.10.4 is Atmosphère's twenty-seventh official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.10.4.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.10.4 is bundled with hbl 2.3, and hbmenu 3.2.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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 of 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.10, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.10.3

0.10.3 is Atmosphère's twenty-sixth official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.10.3.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.10.3 is bundled with hbl 2.3, and hbmenu 3.2.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.10.0, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.10.2

0.10.2 is Atmosphère's twenty-fifth official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.10.2.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.10.2 is bundled with hbl 2.3, and hbmenu 3.2.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.
    • As usual, edit the atmosphere section of /atmosphere/config/system_settings.ini if you wish to do so.
  • 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.10.0, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.10.1

0.10.1 is Atmosphère's twenty-fourth official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.10.0.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.10.1 is bundled with hbl 2.3, and hbmenu 3.2.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.

• The boot system module is now loaded into non-secure memory.

  • This helps somewhat to prevent fragmentation of the system memory heap.

• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.10.0, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.10.0

0.10.0 is Atmosphère's twenty-third official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.10.0.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.10.0 is bundled with hbl 2.2, and hbmenu 3.1.1.

• Please note: Atmosphère 0.10.0 is currently in pre-release.
  • If any bugs are reported while Atmosphère is in pre-release, they will be fixed and the build will be updated.
  • 0.10.0 will transition to release after a short amount of time has passed without pressing bug reports.

The following was changed since the last release:

• Support was added for 9.1.0
  • Please note: The temporary hid-mitm added in Atmosphere 0.9.x 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.10.0, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.9.4

0.9.4 is Atmosphère's twenty-second official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.9.3.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.9.4 is bundled with hbl 2.2, and hbmenu 3.1.1.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.
  • Please note: 9.0.0 updated the switch's gamecart controller ("lotus") firmware.
    • To prevent the burning of lotus fuses, Atmosphere now applies nogc patches when booting into 9.0.0 with fuses below 9.0.0.
    • If you wish to play gamecarts on 9.0.0 (but forever prevent yourself from playing them on < 9.0.0), set nogc = 0 in BCT.ini.
• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.9.0, please see the official release notes.

Atmosphère 0.9.3

0.9.3 is Atmosphère's twenty-first official release.

fusee-primary was last updated in: 0.9.3.

With thanks to the @switchbrew team, Atmosphère 0.9.3 is bundled with hbl 2.2, and hbmenu 3.1.0.

The following was changed since the last release:

• 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.

For information on the featureset supported by 0.9.0, please see the official release notes.