ETK v0.1.4 — Supports official ROCKNIX 20260601 and internal storage options

ETK graduates from chasing nightlies to pinning the official ROCKNIX release (20260601), and adds an optional high-performance internal-storage path for intensive shader-harvesting runs. SD-card support was proven first; internal UFS is now an optional but recommended upgrade for operators who want a smoother, more durable rig. This is ETK's first full (non-prerelease) release.

🏁 Official release support

ETK is now certified against the official ROCKNIX release 20260601 (Mesa Turnip 26.1.0, kernel 7.0.2) on the SM8250 (Retroid Pocket Flip 2) — no more pinning to a moving nightly. Certification passed the full gate: clean structural drift (baseline banked + pinned), gamepad/headless ignition, R3 recovery surviving suspend/resume, and per-game render re-validated on GT HD Concept and GT5 Prologue.

💾 Internal storage — optional, recommended for heavy harvesting

For advanced operators, ETK now supports running the shader vault and small games on the device's internal UFS partition instead of the SD card:

• Durability (proven). The shader vault is rewritten every session — moving it off the wear-prone SD card to internal UFS reduces card wear and corruption exposure (the SD is the rig's single point of failure). Shaders write, credit, and survive an R3 recovery correctly on UFS.
• Smoothness (operator-confirmed). Running GT HD Concept and GT5 Prologue fully on internal is a clear, repeatable improvement in feel. ETK has no numerical frame-pacing instrument — a known limitation of MangoHUD telemetry on this platform — so the operator's subjective A/B comparison is treated as a first-class datapoint.
• Reversible by design. Symlink-based, with on-SD .presplit safety copies and a ROLLBACK.sh; install.sh is internal-aware and syncs symlink-safely with no change to your workflow.

This is advanced, opt-in territory. Internal storage does not improve crash stability, a full library doesn't fit a small partition (GT6/GT5 are too big), and reverting an OS-on-internal install requires fastboot. The new README Internal Storage (Advanced) section covers the partition layout, the LABEL=ROCKNIX/STORAGE collision, config divergence, and the ≥1.5 GB headroom rule before you commit.

🏁 Race-stability milestone (GT5P)

The headline durability blocker has been broken: Gran Turismo Prologue cleared the race-stability bar — five consecutive crash-free runs to a graceful exit — and exceeded it, with a best streak of 16 crash-free sessions (8 of them back-to-back clean finishes), including a run that carried into the official 20260601 release. The cause was the shader vault saturating: once the cache stops compiling mid-race, the in-race GPU fence timeout that defined the first month of testing largely stops firing.

This is the proof that matters — the rig can reach race-stable — but it's a property of a saturated vault, not the fresh install. The official 20260601 migration resets the vault, so a from-scratch rig re-enters the harvest cycle and will crash again until the cache re-saturates. That's by design: crashing is how shaders get banked. Two ways to reach the stable end-state faster:

• Import a community-shared vault (per-game shader .zips in the README) to skip most of the harvest.
• Keep R3 within reach and let the productive-crashing cycle do its work.

v0.1.4 is the release where race-stability was proven reachable — not where every session is clean. You will still crash; that's the sport.

Upgrade

Update ROCKNIX to the official 20260601 release, then run ./install.sh (macOS/Linux/WSL2) or the PowerShell installer (Windows) to sync. Internal-storage setup is documented in the README's Internal Storage (Advanced) section for operators who want it.

Full changelog: see CHANGELOG.md.