[Magisk] topjohnwu:
Some Recent Updates

I wish I can be more vocal in the forums, so more information can be spread to the community, but being a university student in Taiwan, studying engineering specifically, is not easy.

It has been a while since the last release, I think I would shed some light regarding the next big update.

Unified Binary

First, the most obvious change is that Magisk no longer rely on the overly complicated scripts, but instead replaced with pure C/C++ programs. Along with Magisk's development, more and more features were added, and those cannot be done with scripts are added as binaries (magiskhide, magiskpolicy, resetprop etc.). As a result, in the last build (v12.0) there are tons of binaries scattered, loosely working together with poor communication.

So the first thing to do is to combine everything as a single program, something like busybox, which is a single binary that acts as multiple utilities. This took me quite some time to finish, especially merging the existing superuser with other parts that also requires daemon connection. Another tricky part is to port the spaghetti shell script into proper C code. The good news is that both of them are done (though, some small bugs might exist and I'm currently hunting them down)

No More Busybox!

Second is the decision to remove the bundled busybox. Initially I added busybox into Magisk due to lack of proper commandline tools in native Android environment (e.g. lack of losetup in Android 5.0), and also many selinux specific options for several utilities do not exist in official AOSP toolbox/toybox. The big problem is that the busybox causes more issues than I would ever expect. Many features in v12 are implemented to only work with that specific busybox bundled with Magisk. However due to the variety of configurations of custom roms, the assumption that the target busybox is always there, working as expected obviously isn't true, leading to numerous breakage and headaches. This is one of the reason why tons of issues submitted to Github are not addressed, because all pre-v13 are haunted with the same issue - the environment Magisk is running is a mess.

However, thanks to ditching shell scripts completely, currently I handle everything by natively calling system calls, or by implementing the functions directly into the binary (another tedious task...). So Magisk now works as a complete package itself, no more dependency and requirements in the environment. Due to this change, the Magisk Manager would need to include a busybox in order to provide the environment to install Magisk modules/Magisk updates, which I think many tracking the development on Github would already notice this change.

Those wondering how to add busybox if they want? I'll release a new module in the repo.

Android O

Finally, Android O support! As expected, Android O has quite some security changes, but since I'm gonna start everything from scratch anyway, things are all quickly sorted out. Also thanks to the arrival of my Nexus 5X, I can finally test things on an actual device, as a result Magisk is now 100% working on Android O DP1. The module template might need some slight updates regarding Android O changes, please stay tuned for the announcement!

Of course, tons of other improvements are also included, I won't list all of them here and will leave them for the release post and changelogs. Updates to Magisk Manager are also work in progress (application development is very tiresome...). There are still tons of features/support bugging in my mind and I would hope I can implement all, but the reality and school prevents me to do so, I am now aiming more towards a stable release rather than rushing out poorly designed features and making me regret in future maintenance lol.

I won't have time to publish lots of informative posts as this one, for those who are interested in the active development of Magisk/Magisk Manager, please keep track of the Github repos. I always keep the development work transparent, anyone curious can spend a little effort to build it themselves and have a sneak peak of what's currently going on. Just keep in mind that the cutting edge master branch does not always work properly :p