Biosphere

Bringing life to Nintendo Switch homebrew!

Biosphere (previously a devkitA64 homebrew library) is a homebrew toolchain / development kit using LLVM and clang.

IMPORTANT! use this at your own risk (see state below), since the libraries are still under development.

WIP status (TODO)

• Libraries boot and work fine, but libbio still lacks some essential features:

  • Graphics support, console logs to fauna-flora system or via SVC

  • RomFs support, and finish the filesystem implementation, which is not fully implemented.

  • Sockets via bsd services

  • Finish CRT0 - left stuff: HBABI key/value system, argv for NSOs, address space for 1.0.0

  • Current assertion system seems to be badly implemented, and needs a rewrite

  • Newlib implementation, where many basic calls aren't present/are stubbed

• Examples work (except rom, since NRO-based RomFs isn't yet implemented)

Status of fauna/flora

• Both seem to work fine in general

• If system sleeps and is reawaken a reboot is needed for fauna to reconnect

• If fauna is closed, same as above ^

libbio

Biosphere's high-level homebrew library, with no C and almost 100% C++ (except some bits of assembly).

Features

• Taking advantage of C++17 for some nice things, such as structured binding:

auto [res, fsp_session] = bio::fsp::Service::Initialize();
if(res.IsSuccess())
{
    // Do things with fsp session ( fsp_session->OpenSdCardFileSystem(...) )
}

• Simple and easy-to-use IPC interface focusing on simplicity, based on libtransistor's one, and internal IPC handling ported from libnx's source:

// Sample, call psm->GetBatteryChargePrecentage()

// libnx way

Service psm;
Result rc = smGetService(&psm, "psm");
if(R_SUCCEEDED(rc))
{
    IpcCommand c;
    ipcInitialize(&c);

    struct InRaw
    {
        u64 magic;
        u64 cmdid;
    } *in_raw = (InRaw*)ipcPrepareHeader(%c, sizeof(*in_raw));

    in_raw->magic = SFCI_MAGIC;
    in_raw->cmdid = 0;

    rc = serviceIpcDispatch(&psm);
    if(R_SUCCEEDED(rc))
    {
        IpcParsedCommand r;
        ipcParse(&r);

        struct OutRaw
        {
            u64 magic;
            u64 res;
            u32 out_percentage;
        } *out_raw = (OutRaw*)r.Raw;

        rc = out_raw->res;
        if(R_SUCCEEDED(rc))
        {
            u32 battery = resp->out_percentage;
        }
    }
}

// Biosphere way

bio::ipc::ServiceSession psm("psm");
auto rc = psm.GetInitialResult();
if(rc.IsSuccess())
{
    u32 battery;
    rc = psm.ProcessRequest<0>(bio::ipc::OutRaw<u32>(battery));
}

fauna and flora

fauna and flora are the two tools used for console <-> PC logging.

fauna

Fauna is the PC tool which will wait for data sent by flora process.

flora

Flora is the background process (and service) which will be used to log data to fauna PC tool via TCP.

Building

Clone with git clone --recurse-submodules and run make. This should build every default library (newlib, libcxx), libbio and other projects.

Required dependencies (for building the toolchain)

• Ubuntu/Linux is suggested. For Windows users, WSL should be used. I (XorTroll) personally compile in Windows, with WSL/Ubuntu.

• Install llvm, llvm-config, clang, cmake and make (if problems happen, try to install autoconf?).

If the build succeeded, the built Biosphere "devkit" will be located at /Biosphere. you should see a script named SetBiosphereRoot.sh in that directory. After compiling, you can move the output directory anywhere you wish to. After you've located it, run the script and will set Biosphere's env var in there.

Developing homebrew

Download the latest release. Will contain the built toolchain inside Biosphere directory.

Set BIOSPHERE_ROOT environment variable to the directory.

In order to build homebrew, check the example projects in examples.

IMPORTANT! if you happen to move Biosphere's main directory, re-run the root SetBiosphereRoot.sh script to re-set the env var if you would like to use Biosphere ever again ;)

Credits

• libtransistor project and team for the base of using LLVM for homebrew development. This project is a fork of libtransistor-base in the end, and much libbio content (such as ld module) is ported from libtransistor :P

• linkle project, since it's the tool used for NRO/NSO generation.

• switchbrew and libnx as a base for resources, since they also are the base for the old Biosphere project, whose code is being ported/reused for this new project.