Homebrew Wii U Linux

[laharl22]

How to start the desktop apt get install nothing via console Im missing I have knowledge only on Debian and Ubuntu on pc on wii u this is completely hard to setup

 

[CompuCat]

@laharl22 Ping us over at discord.fortheusers.org in the #linux channel for faster support; I only check GBATemp every once in a while.

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Nintendo themselves, as well as other places. Here are a few sources regarding Nintendo Consoles and Linux.

Free Open source Software: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/
Switch running BSD: http://nintendotoday.com/nintendo-switch-linux/
Wii U actually uses MULTI, but the game console OS can run and debug embedded Linux: https://ghs.com/products/MULTI_IDE.html
NES Classic runs Linux: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/11/nintendo-nes-classic-single-board-pc-linux
While the Wii uses IOS, it is suspected to have a Linux kernel (check the file structure for clues!): https://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/IOS

While IOS (and IOSU, what the WiiU runs) share a lot of ideas from linux (/dev, ioctls, etc.) it's definitely not Actually Linux. It's a custom kernel - this is pretty easy to see when reverse-engineering it (it's full of things that only make sense on the Wii/WiiU hardware - remember that Linux supports many more things, so you'd expect to find code that could be "swapped out" for other device drivers and the like). Another big tell is that the syscalls are completely different.
I get that's a vague answer that's hard to quantify, so here's something a bit more concrete. IOS-FS is one of the modules in the IOSU, which handles all the different filesystem types the wiiu supports - fat for the sdcard, isfs for the nand, wfs for USBs, etc. etc.
Question: why does this exist?
Linux has full filesystem support already in the kernel - a proper vfs, permissions, and heaps of filesystem drivers using a known API. If this was Linux, it would have made much more sense for Nintendo to add their custom filesystems to Linux, perhaps as a module so it could be closed-source. Not only does the IOSU kernel have no evidence of this, it ends up having *less* features than even a stripped-down Linux kernel.
To top it off, Linux ships with a high-quality fat32 driver, supporting many partitions and codepages - generally regarded as Quite Good. However, IOS-FS is known to include a third-party, commercial fat32 driver (if someone could find the press release about this that'd be sweet). It kinda. sucks. hard? It's really slow, doesn't have partition support, and freaks out often if things aren't Just So.
Final point: under GPL, Nintendo would have to upload most of the kernel source code to that page you liked. however, the Wii U download in there is mostly WebKit stuff for the Internet Browser, no sign of a Linux kernel.
MULTI is an IDE, an editor to write code in (like Notepad++ or Atom - a better comparison would be Eclipse or NetBeans) and isn't actually an OS in and of itself.

As far as I know, there's a mention of BSD in the Switch's licenses page because it uses BSD sockets - you can watch the switch console security talk (35c3?) where The Big Names mention it's an extension of Horizon, the custom kernel also used on the 3DS.
The NES Classic does run Linux though, at least there's that~

 

[laharl22]

I Cant do nothing on the console sudo wget and many command dont work there are a native desktop?linux on PC is very easy compared to Wii u

 

[CompuCat]

@laharl22 Like I said earlier, ping us over at discord.fortheusers.org in the #linux-android channel for support. I'm asking you to do this for two reasons:

1. Endless support back-and-forth can and will clog up this discussion thread
2. quarky, rw and I don't actively monitor GBATemp; we respond much, much faster over Discord

If you're really opposed to using Discord as a service (and I don't blame you!), pop on over to https://compucat.me/about or https://heyquark.com/aboutme for alternative ways to contact us. (I'm not sure rw has a public website, sorry)

 

[laharl22]

How to configure wifi please?i am in no social network for personal raison i can only post hère

 

[depaul]

How to configure wifi please?i am in no social network for personal raison i can only post hère

@laharl22 Like I said earlier, ping us over at discord.fortheusers.org in the #linux-android channel for support. I'm asking you to do this for two reasons:

1. Endless support back-and-forth can and will clog up this discussion thread
2. quarky, rw and I don't actively monitor GBATemp; we respond much, much faster over Discord

If you're really opposed to using Discord as a service (and I don't blame you!), pop on over to https://compucat.me/about or https://heyquark.com/aboutme for alternative ways to contact us. (I'm not sure rw has a public website, sorry)

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Hey folks! Long updates, slow updates.
- We made a Discord! Join it if you want, it's mostly us talking about kernel improvements and then me struggling to find anyone to test them.
- The kernel rewrite we started, uh.. early last year? is finally starting to take shape, so I'm putting it out as a release candidate, or a beta, or whatever you want to call it. Here's a build you can try; ideally you should be able to swap out the old 4.16 dtbImage with this one and have everything Just Work. Remember that this is a beta, so if something doesn't work quite the way you expected, please let us know! If nobody has any issues, I expect to make this the default version by the end of the month, along with updated distro images and documentation and whatever. I'll probably move the 4.16 archive to a different git repo, because it's huge; so watch out for your links.

There's more info on our little beta on Discord, but here's some highlights:
- kernel version 4.19; which was updated recently - 2 days ago. It's projected to be supported until Dec 2020, so you'll get security patches and stuff for a while. This is a stable, release kernel, instead of the random development snapshot we used before. We can even start to think about upstreaming.
- Improvements to the video driver: it's a little bit faster, and the gamepad screen can be used. Note this is still software-rendered.
- A driver for the buttons on the Gamepad (no touch); because why the hell not.
- All the USB ports, all the time. Yes, the ones on the front work.

Thanks to all of you who've stuck with us, I know we kinda let the user-facing kernels rot a bit while this got worked on. Hopefully the beta shows itself to be reasonably low on bugs and we can get it out as the default.

(edit: changed link to second beta; original link was this)

 

[depaul]

That's GOOD news! Thank you @QuarkTheAwesome and everybody working on that project. I'm excited to try that build later today

 

[lordelan]

Amazing to still see some progress here. Sounds very good. Nice to have 4.19 on the Wii U now! =)

 

[Valery0p]

the gamepad screen can be used. Note this is still software-rendered.
- A driver for the buttons on the Gamepad (no touch); because why the hell not.

Wait, you can now connect to the gamepad, send video and receive button presses? That's niiice
This means that, in theory, you can port this driver to work on any computer with an unlocked 5ghz wifi adapter?
( I mean, this existed, but it uses lib drc, and you probably already know how it doesn't work with newer kernel versions...)

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Wait, you can now connect to the gamepad, send video and receive button presses? That's niiice
This means that, in theory, you can port this driver to work on any computer with an unlocked 5ghz wifi adapter?
( I mean, this existed, but it uses lib drc, and you probably already know how it doesn't work with newer kernel versions...)

Sadly not - the Wii U actually has a separate chip (DRH) that handles the gamepad communication and video encoding. We actually can't see the 5GHz WiFi card from linux at all - only the DRH can access it. Since you can't boot Linux without booting IOSU first (at the moment), we're kinda piggybacking off the fact that IOSU has got the DRH all set up for us, and connected the gamepad, before Linux even starts.
The video is connected to one of the ports on the Radeon (or so I'm told), and the DRH emulates a USB device for button presses, the microphone, and other things. I'd love to learn the specifics of how the audio/video gets from the main chips and into the DRH, because all my attempts to use the USB interfaces the DRH advertises just disconnects the Gamepad. I had a go at reverse-engineering the DRH firmware, but without any information about the memory map and other things it's not very productive.

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

There was an issue reported on Discord that stopped the new kernel working with our Lubuntu images; I've updated the link in my post to a second beta that should have that fixed.

 

[Flame]

There was an issue reported on Discord that stopped the new kernel working with our Lubuntu images; I've updated the link in my post to a second beta that should have that fixed.

im going to put my hands up. it was human error. i dont think they was any problem with your build. it was what i did. i was running debian and not the Lubuntu . i followed the wiki which had this Debian build.

 

[Ewpb]

There was an issue reported on Discord that stopped the new kernel working with our Lubuntu images; I've updated the link in my post to a second beta that should have that fixed.

Big hugs. This is legendary work.

 

[Gunstorm]

Great news guys!!!
A litle doubt... Wifi is working?

 

[CompuCat]

Gunstorm: Wi-Fi is *not* working; we're still RE'ing how the firmware upload works.

 

[Medveitsi]

thank you

 

[PetrusAlves]

The project is still active ?

There are advances in the use of the GPU ?

 

[CompuCat]

@PetrusAlves: Yes! We're still active, though development has taken a bit of a back seat to some other CafeOS-side work that I can't quite talk about publicly yet. Still not much progress on the GPU front.