Newsletter #4 - November 2018 (Patreon)

Another month full of complications, but at least things are moving (albeit a bit too slow for my liking).

I've taken up a little hobby project of my own making with the Manga Reader for the Nintendo Switch, intended to fill the gap between the Alldocube X release date (which I'm currently waiting for to have a better vendor / blob / sdk base for my GPD XD+ work) and now, which was meant to be a fast and clean simple job, only to be stalled by platform issues on the Nintendo Switch.

The core of this project is its backend interface, which gets fed by a variety of internet catalogs like KissManga, which up until a few weeks ago was all http-based.

Due to KissManga's recent move to a https-only webserver, I was forced to look into a SSL library issue that's been plaguing the Nintendo Switch for several months now, preventing homebrew from accessing https websites.

As such, although the actual Manga Reader has been feature-complete and ready for several weeks now, I still can't release it due to this https issue preventing it from accessing said backends in the Nintendo Switch build configuration.

The last two weeks were essentially spent doing absolutely nothing but debug why this issue exists, and after quite a few long nights (and consulting with other Nintendo Switch developers like natinusala) it's been found that the issue seems to be related to some kind of buffer / pool exhaustion inside the socket syscalls for non-blocking sockets.

Ironically enough, it seems these buffers can be flushed by spraying and flushing random local file descriptors with data, which will make the socket calls work properly (for a limited amount of time).

Which brings me to the current state of things regarding the Manga Reader project: By using a manually patched mbedtls / openssl library that sprays a dummy local file descriptor regularly I can operate SSL sockets properly... although at a speed that is abysmal and as such, unsuitable for what they are meant to do, namely request / transfer huge amounts of manga catalog data (the catalog itself, covers, chapter lists, page images, etc).

I wish there was more to show for this month, but some times some extremely nasty bugs just keep things from moving at a desirable pace. This month is one of those.

I will keep you all posted as I make progress and (hopefully) find a proper fix for the issue.

Until the next time!

- Black-Seraph