Homebrew Whats the point of using b9s with luma cfw.

[LinusRG]

Can someone help me understand why we need boot 9 strap when we can easily inject luma's firm file into the firm0 spot and boot luma directly (tried this myself on multiple different 3ds consoles and it worked every time). It seems that the only extra feature boot 9 strap offers either than booting luma cfw is the fact that you can boot multiple different payloads.

 

[ghjfdtg]

It's not intended to be installed in firm0. Also it only allows this to prevent bricks.

 

[LinusRG]

where is it installed to and how does it prevent bricks?

 

[Ryccardo]

If you use the common B9S + Luma combo as described in many guides, B9S is in a kernel partition and Luma is in the root of the SD or ctrnand, named "boot.firm"

In this case the bootrom only loads, verifies, and runs B9S - what happens next (the two fixed possible sources, the mounting of sd/ctrnand, etc) are 100% up to B9S

B9S can be substituted with other compatible bootloaders like fastboot3ds or godmode9, which may or may not implement things differently (spoiler: they do), for example giving you more or less choice of sources of kernels to boot and extra options

There's no technical reason for which Luma cannot be installed directly as the kernel to boot; the developers simply chose to not support being booted that way (for reasons related to discontinuing CakeHax/A9LH versions - they weren't interested in supporting different initial environments and the different potential issues that come with that)


B9S by itself doesn't even offer "the ability to boot multiple different payloads" unless you really want to stretch the SD-first-then-try-ctrnand design

 

[Lacius]

At this point, using Luma3DS in place of B9S is a fine option. There's no advantage to using Luma3DS directly like this though.

 

[LinusRG]

so is boot 9 strap installed into either the firm1 or 0 partition (are those partitions the kernal partitions?)

 

[Ryccardo]

so is boot 9 strap installed into either the firm1 or 0 partition (are those partitions the kernal partitions?)

Yes, the bootrom can only boot (apart from slot-1 when using ntrboot) the first kernel partition, unless that fails verification then it tries firm1 (and if that fails, firm2, etc if they actually existed - they are obviously not there from the factory but it's theoretically possible to create them)

Other programs can do what they want (fastboot3ds and godmode9 explicitly allow you to run the other kernel partition, which you can program with gm9)

 

[LinusRG]

thankyou. So just to confirm b9s in installed into firm 0 which in turb boots luma cfw