[DISCUSSION] New partition layout for Android-x86

[Thisara Kasun]

Hi,
Since Android 7(nougat) is going to introduce a new partition layout,mainly to support its seamless update feature(to maintain two seperate system images),Do any of you think that Android-x86 partition layout have to improved?
I know this won't directly benefit android-x86,but this will let distros like RemixOS and PhoenixOS implement seamless updates in the future.

[Hypo Turtle]

With RemixOS you already can maintain 2 separate system images. One is a system.sfs (obviously read-only) for OTAs and the other is a read-writable system.img
OTAs being applied by removing the system.img; unpacking the sfs to generate a fresh unmodified system.img for the OTA to apply to; then it being repacked into a new system.sfs.
Which is re-unpacked when/if you choose to go back to maintaining two system images.

[Povilas Staniulis]

Android x86, unlike Android on native devices (smartphones, tablets)
does not require multiple partitions to work, everything can run from a
single partition.
Separating /system and /data might be useful for updates but this would
require reworking the installer.

[Hypo Turtle]

With regard to RemixOS and x86update - which I'm not sure if it's used by Ax86 -

The current OTA method is applied via initrd.img i.e. prior to the chroot handoff into Android.

For it to be seemless; I guess like in Android N - this would need to be handled by ramdisk.img/system.img and the .img files (i.e. partitions) that are to be updated need to be inactive.
This seems feasible to me with RemixOS when using the alternative rw system_dev.img as it leaves system.sfs unused. Kernel, initrd.img and ramdisk.img are also inactive as they are loaded into memory right?

So from running system, once an OTA is downloaded it could be applied via x86update, seemlessly in the background to system.sfs, kernel, initrd.img and ramdisk.img
[If you aren't aware the OTA updates are file-block based patches against those imgs; after validating via sha]

[fuzzy7k]

This is the kind of thing btrfs snapshots are designed for. No need to fragment the disk with multiple partitions, just apply the updates to a new subvolume and you can roll forward or roll back, easy peasy,

[Bob Peng]

Hi about the installer and ota update, i have apare time to do it,  any suggestion welcome!

在 2016年8月17日星期三 UTC+8下午8:54:25，Povilas Staniulis写道：