[Magisk] topjohnwu:
2017.10.15 Magisk v14.3

Here is another release, which comes with quite a few exciting updates!

Introduce Invincible Mode

Let's get straight into the interesting part!

Due to the nature of Magisk, the daemon is responsible for everything: initial boot scripts, magic mount, root, MagiskHide, logging etc., so it is important to make sure it never fails. Even though I have spent A LOT of effort in making the daemon as stable as possible, there are still tons of probability that might cause the Magisk daemon to crash: modules that messes with the internal workings of Magisk; root apps that have unexpected behaviors etc.. With the daemon crashed, root will lost, and SafetyNet will no longer pass, which would be very annoying and frustrating.

Even though I personally never experienced any root loss issues, the number of complaints urged me to implement a "self recoverable" daemon, which I would like to call it "invincible mode". Basically, the system will make sure the Magisk daemon is always running, and will restart if crashes (or even manually force killing the daemon!). Most of the effort is to make the restart seamlessly: that is logging will continue, and MagiskHide will still start up if enabled.

Rewrite Magisk Logcat Handling

The daemon uses logcat in many different situations: the general logging (/cache/magisk.log), verbose boot+debug logging (/data/magisk_debug.log)(only in beta builds), and MagiskHide (monitor process startups). In the worst case scenario, the daemon will come along with 3 logcat child processes; in addition, each process will require its own implementation to handle logcat errors and restarting. In this new update, I created a single logcat subprocess for the daemon, and each worker threads that need logs can simply plug in its own listener on-the-go, and leave anytime if not needed. By doing so, each process can access the "real-time" logs (if starting a new logcat process, it will first dump logs in the buffer before showing the real-time logs), and don't need to worry about restarting logcat if anything happens.

Magisk Manager Now 100% FOSS

The Magisk Manager also got a pretty sweet update! Tons of improvements are added, check the changelog for the detailed new features. (The new manager will be pushed to stable channel)

One thing I would like to highlight is that - Magisk Manager is now officially 100% FOSS! You might be wondering: isn't Magisk already open source? The truth is that Magisk Manager contains part of Google's proprietary "Google Play Service SDK" for SafetyNet checking, which make Magisk Manager technically not "FOSS". It is quite stupid to lose the "FOSS" tag for such minor thing as SN checking, but I found it extremely convenient and didn't really want to remove this feature. So what I did is separate the proprietary part from the application, and let users decide whether to download an external code extension (contains GoogleApi) for SafetyNet checking, which actually is pretty challenging since it involves dynamic dex loading and uses quite a few reflection techniques, but it was a lot of Java fun lol.

This makes Magisk Manager feasible to be placed on F-Droid, I will find some time to publish to their repository.

Online Repo

Magisk Manager is now updated to reject all repos with the template version lower than 4. I already filed issues to the outdated repos, if no action is done, your repo will be removed very soon.

For the next stable release, I will push even further to require all repos to be at least version 1400. For developers not using my template, make sure to test your module against Magisk v14+, and please also remember to bump the template entry in module.prop to 1400 to prevent from blacklisting.

These measures are done to make sure developers keep up with the latest changes, and don't let online repos be filled with outdated, boot-loopable modules. Thank you for your cooperation!

If nothing catastrophic happens on this beta build, the new stable release is imminent :)