IOS Overview

IOS is the Wii's internal operating system running on an ARM coprocessor. Games run on the bare metal but rely on IOS for essential services like DI, USB and power state management.

The information on this page only holds for the latest development version. Older versions have worse emulation.

Emulation

Dolphin does not emulate the Starlet coprocessor at all, except the IPC registers, which are however hardcoded to be routed to IOS HLE. This means that Dolphin is unable to run any IOS or anything running on the Starlet, and instead HLEs IOS. This works fine with anything that doesn't rely on raw hardware access or patching IOS.

Differences between IOS versions are typically not emulated, since they are mostly minor and do not affect anything. The USB modules are currently the only exception.

HLE Overview

Modules

Module	Status
Kernel	N/A
ES	Mostly complete. Does not support consumption tracking and two ioctls that expose kernel internals directly (thread priorities). The latter cannot be implemented with HLE in a way that makes sense.
FFS / FFSP	Partial. Does not support filesystem metadata, boot2 or direct flash access.
---	---
DIP	Mostly complete. Implemented as a thin wrapper around Dolphin's DVDInterface.
STM	Mostly complete. Screen dimming is not supported.
---	---
SDI	Complete. Handles SDv2 cards.
---	---
EHCI	Internal, not implemented.
KBD	Not implemented, except on Windows where it uses the host keyboard input.
OH0	Mostly complete.
OH1	Complete.
USB	Internal, not implemented.
USB_HID (v4)	Complete.
USB_HID (v5)	Mostly complete.
USB_HUB	Internal (?), not implemented.
USB_MSC	Internal, not implemented.
USB_SHARED	Internal, not implemented.
USB_VEN	Mostly complete.
---	---
WFSI	Implemented, enough to make DQX fully work
WFSKRN	Implemented, enough to make DQX fully work
---	---
ETH	Internal, not implemented.
KD	Partial. Mostly a stub.
NCD	Partial.
SO	Implemented (uses the host network stack directly).
SSL	Implemented However, Dolphin is unable to use certificates that are built-in to the module.
WD	Partial. Mostly a stub. Can return fake AP info. No Wi-Fi hardware emulation or DS communication.
WL	Not implemented (low-level WLAN driver).

General TODO

• Implement filesystem metadata. Some games rely on it (DQX, Bolt)

• Implement the remaining functionality.

• Threading.

  Dolphin currently runs the entirety of IOS HLE on a single thread, including blocking IO such as NAND filesystem access and networking tasks. This causes terrible performance or stuttering depending on what modules are actually used, and more generally affects all titles using the NAND to a lesser extent.

  The difficulty of implementing threading is that IOS uses many threads internally and there is internal IPC. This means that if the ES thread is blocked for example, the USB thread may just carry on servicing IPC requests and processing USB transfers. A naïve implementation that just moves IOS HLE to a single separate thread will either cause issues (as requests can time out) or be ineffective at eliminating performance issues (if most requests still end up blocking). Additionally, any threaded implementation must still maintain determinism.

• Implement more differences between versions.

  We should only expose resource managers that exist in the running version. This may seem irrelevant, until you remember that a game was relying on differences between IOS versions for their anti-piracy system. This applies to ioctls too.

ES TODO

• Title limits and consumption tracking. (really low priority)

References

• WiiBrew is probably the best (and only) reference for IOS.