Atmosphère v0.10.2 released

Atmosphère v0.10.2 released

January 8th, 2020, 21:51 Posted By: wraggster

The new year has just begun, yet it looks like we're already on June 15th - @SciresM and ReSwitched's CFW, Atmosphère, has been updated once again! Version 0.10.2 is aimed primarily towards bug fixes and general improvements: for example, an issue preventing the CFW from booting on pre-5.0.0 has been solved and game modding is now less prone to crashes. Speaking of that last bit, fs.mitm will no longer run out of memory with LayeredFS mods for games with a large number of files, like Resident Evil 6 and Football Manager 2020 Touch for example. This change may initially slow down the game when being launched, but it will disappear once the mod has been finalized and loaded (plus, this side effect is nearly imperceptible in games with not as many files). Hbl has also seen an improvement, as you can now specify up to eight program IDs with each having their specific override keys.

Last but not least, as it's been previously announced, the hid-mitm submodule used for legacy homebrew has been deprecated and it's currently disabled by default. It can be re-enabled by setting "enable_deprecated_hid_mitm" to true in system_settings.ini, but the feature can potentially be fully removed at any point from now on.

There are also a few other miscellaneous changes and additions, including Mesosphère's (aka the CFW's project to reimplement the Switch OS' kernel) first fully working component. You can read the full official changelog below:
Quoted from changelog:

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.