patch of vold to enable wildcard pathname in vold.fstab and to mount the premounted sdcard

[Jinho You]

The following froyo-x86 patch of vold enables wildcard pathnames in
vold.fstab,

http://natural.jnu.ac.kr/~jhyou/android/vold-wildcard-premount.patch

for example:
dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto /devices/*/sdb /devices/*/
sdb1

This feature is useful, because USB memory stick's device pathname
changes every pull and push like:
/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.0/host2/
target2:0:0/2:0:0:0/block/sdb
/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-6/1-6:1.0/host13/
target13:0:0/13:0:0:0/block/sdb
.....

The replacement of strsep() with strtok_r() in main.cpp permits more
white spaces between words in vold.fstab.

and the patch makes vold mount the premounted sdcard at boot time with
the kernel command line parameter SDCARD=premount or SDCARD=/dev/sdb1,
in the condition that
/system/etc/vold.fstab has the line,

dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard

Jinho

[Jinho You]

> in the condition that
> /system/etc/vold.fstab has the line,
>
> dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard

above line has to be fixed:

dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto

Jinho

[slajeune]

Thanks Jinho!

This patch works flawlesly for premounted partitions. This is really
great!

Cheers,
Stephane.

[Yebyen (Kingdon)]

Too bad I can still not confirm from my end, when I got home with the patched installer build, my user machine was missing squashfs-tools... so when I tried to edit /system/etc/vold.fstab and found it not yet created, then I kicked myself!

Have just installed the squashfs-tools so I can remake system.sfs after adding this file, and I will hopefully have good news to report.  Meanwhile, for anyone who wants to try with the patch, but does not have the hardware to build from scratch,

http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/~yebyen/eeepc_usb.img

Get the squashfs-tools and make the changes in vold.fstab, if you want to have working SD-Card through vold.  I will post an updated image later with better instructions!

Thanks,
Kingdon

2010/11/11 slajeune <stephane....@gmail.com>

[Yebyen (Kingdon)]

I think it is a big problem if you keep system in squashfs, I am about to boot it up again to see for sure, but apps will not download if they can't write to /system

Maybe this is a problem in browser?  Maybe it is actually an issue for a particular app, I only tried to download andappstore client and the browser told me it was a failure with not enough disk space, over 160MB free on either phone/sdcard.

Maybe it will work better when I put it with more than 1GB of total disk available.  This USB stick is only helpful so I don't overwrite my Grub with the installer!  You can also update system by copying a new squashfs in, I guess this only works if you don't also need to update your kernel.

Kingdon

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Kingdon <xulru...@gmail.com> wrote:

It works! Sort of

Wrote the file in /system/etc/vold.fstab as described in the updated version from Jinho You:
dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto

... and my SD card is definitely registered in configuration panel, but, even with 160M free on the phone and 600M free on the sdcard, andappstore will not download onto the phone.  It says not enough space.

I will investigate this further, I am using ext3 for phone and vfat for sdcard, maybe with a larger phone partition or by reducing "saved for root" space on my phone partition with tune2fs, I can make room to download.

Thanks for the patch!
Kingdon

[Yebyen (Kingdon)]

Well, it works pretty well, and I read in this issue about a year old
http://code.google.com/p/android-x86/issues/detail?id=14 that Remote
ADB users can write to Android-X86 squashfs systems using ADB. I think
this must not be right. Can anyone confirm, this is an easier way to
install apps? It sounds like a security issue, and if it is still
true, let's hear also how to lock it down.

I am going to produce the next build on martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu
without squashfs, in case end users will be able to install apps
through the browser with that change, so lets hear from anyone else
with a release blocker, I have limited space for 500MB images and can
only host so many builds.

My xen cluster administrator is only offering 5GB today.

Cheers,
Kingdon

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Android is designed to work on a read-only filesystem,
so is Android-x86.
All user data and settings are saved into
/data or /sdcard dir. Other parts are read-only.
In particular, apks are installed into /data/app
(or /sdcard if it uses app2sd feature).
If you have an Android mobile phone, you can
verified that.

In short, there is no problem to Install apps via browser
in Android-x86. But you need to have sdcard mounted.
(this is just a limit of the browser because
it needs to create temporary data on /sdcard)

2010/11/14 Yebyen (Kingdon) <xulru...@gmail.com>:

> Well, it works pretty well, and I read in this issue about a year old
> http://code.google.com/p/android-x86/issues/detail?id=14 that Remote
> ADB users can write to Android-X86 squashfs systems using ADB. I think
> this must not be right.  Can anyone confirm, this is an easier way to

Check yourself before you doubt it.

> install apps?  It sounds like a security issue, and if it is still
> true, let's hear also how to lock it down.
>
> I am going to produce the next build on martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu
> without squashfs, in case end users will be able to install apps
> through the browser with that change, so lets hear from anyone else
> with a release blocker, I have limited space for 500MB images and can
> only host so many builds.

--
Chih-Wei
Android-x86 project
http://www.android-x86.org

[Yebyen (Kingdon)]

http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/~yebyen

I am starting a build blog here, hope to provide RSS soon, but a working build that I can install apps on is a higher priority for me...

2010/11/14 Yebyen (Kingdon) <xulru...@gmail.com>:

> Well, it works pretty well, and I read in this issue about a year old
> http://code.google.com/p/android-x86/issues/detail?id=14 that Remote
> ADB users can write to Android-X86 squashfs systems using ADB. I think
> this must not be right.  Can anyone confirm, this is an easier way to

Check yourself before you doubt it.

It is a rare day that I have my user machine in the same room as my dev system; I did not know about this functionality of adb, for inspecting Android-x86 or androids that have been rooted!  I will check it out in more depth later.

I will keep reading in logcat, meanwhile I have prepared a build that is not on SquashFS and I'll be testing it against the other version to see if we are mistaken.  But, I cannot download it from McDonalds, unless I am prepared to stay for the whole day :x actually, it seems to be only 145M, not quite 2x the size.

Maybe there is even more compression in there, I thought that Android installed tree uncompressed was close to 500MB.

To repeat the bug report, something is still preventing the browser from writing downloaded APK's, and the SD Card is mounted, and status messages in SD Card and Phone Storage menu all indicate that there is space available on both media.  I have followed the instructions prepared by Jinho You with the patch that was named from the other day "vold-wildcard-premount.patch" and it seems to have got me past the configuration menu "Unavailable" message.  But, still no app downloading.

I was looking for a preference setting in browser that decides where to save downloaded files, or specifically APK's, and did not see an option to save to Phone Memory or SD Card.  I had no problem downloading apps in 1.5/1.6 era on my EeePC product builds, but now a lot has changed I guess.  With the patch, I still have not tested any apps that require or may opt to write to SD, like Camera, so I can't say if it works or not.  But, for some time, it was possible to write to the mounted SD card partition on /mnt/sdcard via the command line interface or by SCP.

That part is no problem.  Even media player will pick up media in that folder, if you rescan it first from the special option in the gears icon tool menu.

Will report again later, hopefully a new patch!  The system works pretty well ;)

Kingdon

[Kingdon]

Running through the end-user tool now before I go, so I can get the exact error message... how do I take screenshots from inside of Android?

<Untitled> Download unsuccessful
Could not be downloaded, free up some space on your phone and try again.

I can write to /sdcard and /mnt/sdcard, as well as /data, manually, no problem, but when I try to download apps in browser, I get this message. I will try a different app, this one may want some privilege that we do not have, AndAppStore is no longer included in the standard android-x86 tree; are there any favorite alternatives on the list?

Also wondering what I need to make the phone remember language settings; every time I reboot, I have to disable again the Onscreen Keyboard, Chinese input, and LIME since I unfortunately do not read and write much Chinese :(

[slajeune]

I had this error and it is because the browser cannot create a
directory named /sdcard/download

Note that Android expects /sdcard to be vfat, and therefore, NO user/
group/world unix permissions. In order to properly mount a vfat
partition at boot time, I had to change the 2-mount script in bootable/
newinstaller/initrd/scripts. This is the part that I changed for the
mount_sdcard:

mount_sdcard()
{
mountpoint -q sdcard && return
if [ "$SDCARD" = "premount" ]; then
if [ -d /mnt/$SRC/sdcard ]; then
mount -o remount,rw /mnt
mount --bind /mnt/$SRC/sdcard mnt/sdcard
elif [ -d data/sdcard ]; then
mount --bind data/sdcard mnt/sdcard

else
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs mnt/sdcard

fi
elif [ -b "$SDCARD" ];
then
mount -t vfat -o umask=000 $SDCARD mnt/sdcard
elif [ -b "/dev/$SDCARD" ];
then
mount -t vfat -o umask=000 /dev/$SDCARD mnt/sdcard

else
false

fi
[ $? -eq 0 ] && sed -i "s|\(EXTERNAL_STORAGE_STATE \).*|
\1mounted|g" init.rc
}

You can try this manually be going into DEBUG mode while booting. At
the first shell prompt, all devices should be mounted. Simply try to
remount your sdcard mount point as vfat with umask=000 as above (you
will need to format the sdcard partition as vfat using newfs_dos).

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Stephane.

[Jinho You]

vold does not check the premounted sdcard if it is vfat. therefore,
non-VFATs can be used as sdcard filesystem.

/sdcard/download is created by froyo-x86/packages/providers/
DownloadProvider/src/com/android/providers/downloads
/Helper.java if it does not exist, however, it is created with the
permission 0700(-rwx------). (The downloaded files are stored with the
permission 0644, -rw-r--r--). And this causes that the downloaded .apk
package file cannot be accessed by Package Installer.
Initial creation of the directory /sdcard/download with 0755
permission will avoid further downloaded package installation
failure.

I tested that the directory /data/sdcard in ext3 filesystem of /data
is premounted on /mnt/sdcard with the kernel command line
SDCARD=premount. http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/~yebyen/1158729.apk
was downloaded into /sdcard/download and was installed correctly.

The modification java_io_File_mkdirImpl() of /dalvik/libcore/luni/src/
main/nativejava_io_File.cpp can create directories with 0755
permission. However, I wonder that it might violate the android's
security policy.
(Personally, I modified java_io_File_createNewFileImpl() to create a
file with 0644 permission, too.)

static jboolean java_io_File_mkdirImpl(JNIEnv* env, jobject,
jbyteArray pathBytes) {
ScopedByteArray path(env, pathBytes);
// On Android, we don't want default permissions to allow global
access.
//return (mkdir(&path[0], S_IRWXU) == 0);
return (mkdir(&path[0], 0755) == 0);
}

Jinho

[Kingdon]

I have not tried the patch here, but I can confirm that once I copy AndAppStore .apk file to my SD Card by some other means (SCP, ADB bridge, wget) and open it from OI File Manager, it installs with no error and only Browser is left unable to download apps (or other files, presumably)

Works great!
I feel sure that I am missing some features of the new vold, I still have to manually mount a USB stick through a command-line interface (I did see your alternative, Jinho) just to copy files in without a network connection. I will produce more builds on request at the RIT mirror, but for now, it works well, and the simple fstab update required in /system/etc/vold.fstab that required me to unsquashfs and resquashfs my system.sfs image, I can't say that it's secure for any "Void if Tampered" warranty policy, just for being compressed, but I don't know how to get in there through ADB as Chih-Weh has suggested.

So, adding that setting to the system.sfs image should be considered Hardware Vendor ISV Step #1 ;) I'll add it to my formal release acceptance checklist

Thanks for terrific support, guys!
Kingdon

Jinho You <l04...@gmail.com> wrote:

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>

[Yebyen (Kingdon)]

There are some instructions now, they still probably can't really use it without hunting around in a newsgroup or failing the install a few times at first...

Pretty sure I haven't leaked my Facebook password in any of these builds. :D

The build marked USE_SQUASHFS=0 does not even boot from grub, I think it was a failed compile.  I will release an updated system.sfs pre-patched with vold.fstab if anyone wants, I still have a few release blockers on my list... I am interested to hear how you can do this update to /system folder without unsquashfs/mksquashfs!  I believe that Chih-Weh said it was possible using ADB bridge.

yebyen (Kingdon)
http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/~yebyen/

[slajeune]

For my part, I have done the following to ensure that I have read-
write access to the /system file system:

- USE_SQUASHFS=0 as you have done
- in bootable/newinstaller/initrd/init modify this section:

if [ -e /mnt/$SRC/system.sfs ]; then
mount -o loop /mnt/$SRC/system.sfs /sfs
mount -o loop /sfs/system.img system
else
mount -o loop /mnt/$SRC/system.img system
fi


to this:

if [ -e /mnt/$SRC/system.sfs ]; then
mount -o loop /mnt/$SRC/system.sfs /sfs
mount -o loop /sfs/system.img system
else
mount -o rw,loop /mnt/$SRC/system.img system
fi


This will mount the system.img as read write and you can hack away as
much as you like!

Cheers,
Stephane.

On Nov 15, 5:45 pm, "Yebyen (Kingdon)" <xulrunne...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There are some instructions now, they still probably can't really use it
> without hunting around in a newsgroup or failing the install a few times at
> first...
>
> Pretty sure I haven't leaked my Facebook password in any of these builds. :D
>
> The build marked USE_SQUASHFS=0 does not even boot from grub, I think it was
> a failed compile.  I will release an updated system.sfs pre-patched with
> vold.fstab if anyone wants, I still have a few release blockers on my
> list... I am interested to hear how you can do this update to /system folder
> without unsquashfs/mksquashfs!  I believe that Chih-Weh said it was possible
> using ADB bridge.
>

> yebyen (Kingdon)http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/~yebyen/
>
> On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Yebyen (Kingdon) <xulrunne...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/~yebyen<http://martyfunkhouser.csh.rit.edu/%7Eyebyen>

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Thanks for everyone who worked and tested
the vold issue.
Jinho's patch is workable for fake sdcard,
but I think it's still a workaround and not satisfying.

I'm working on a final solution.
Please be patient for it.

PS. The main git server of android-x86 was down
due to some unknown reason.
I've asked the administrator for help.

2010/11/12 slajeune <stephane....@gmail.com>:

> Thanks Jinho!
>
> This patch works flawlesly for premounted partitions.  This is really
> great!
>
> Cheers,
> Stephane.
>
> On Nov 11, 8:17 am, Jinho You <l04f...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > in the condition that
>> > /system/etc/vold.fstab has the line,
>>
>> >      dev_mount  sdcard  /mnt/sdcard
>>
>> above line has to be fixed:
>>
>>    dev_mount  sdcard  /mnt/sdcard  auto
>>

--

[Jinho You]

There is a previous thread and patch related to changing path names of
hot-plugging USB mass storage device:


http://groups.google.com/group/android-x86/browse_thread/thread/4ac896904eb0c8f8/aee76244df37aef8?lnk=gst&q=sdcard+vold#aee76244df37aef8

Jinho

On 11월16일, 오후2시42분, Chih-Wei Huang <cwhu...@android-x86.org> wrote:
> Thanks for everyone who worked and tested
> the vold issue.
> Jinho's patch is workable for fake sdcard,
> but I think it's still a workaround and not satisfying.
>
> I'm working on a final solution.
> Please be patient for it.
>
> PS. The main git server of android-x86 was down
> due to some unknown reason.
> I've asked the administrator for help.
>

> 2010/11/12 slajeune <stephane.lajeune...@gmail.com>:

[slajeune]

Forgot to say that this part:

for device in /dev/sr* /dev/sd[a-z]*; do
try_mount ro $device /mnt || continue
cd /mnt/$SRC

Needs to be changed to this also:

for device in /dev/sr* /dev/sd[a-z]*; do
try_mount rw $device /mnt || continue
cd /mnt/$SRC

Cheers,
Stephane.

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Hi,
I have added a new class AutoVolume to vold
to support auto-mount and fake sdcard.
The Sdcard HowTo is updated to explain
all the new features:

http://www.android-x86.org/documents/sdcardhowto

Comparing to other workarounds posted in the group,
the new implementation is cleaner.
It handles the SDCARD in cmdline directly
so the fake sdcard works exactly like
a real sdcard. For example, you can
umount, remount, or even format it from the GUI.
(except SDCARD=premount, which is marked as deprecated)

However, I still appreciate everyone who
discussed, worked and tested on this issue
so I can work out the final solution.

Note to take advantage of the new implementation,
you have to remove /etc/vold.fstab (if exists).

PS. Now we have only one release blocking issue for froyo-x86:
the camera crashing. Any volunteer?

2010/11/16 Chih-Wei Huang <cwh...@android-x86.org>:

> Thanks for everyone who worked and tested
> the vold issue.
> Jinho's patch is workable for fake sdcard,
> but I think it's still a workaround and not satisfying.
>
> I'm working on a final solution.
> Please be patient for it.

--

[slajeune]

Thanks for the patch Chih-Wei.

However, we would need to be able to use this AutoVolume with
vold.fstab. The reason is that we might want to auto mount an
internal SDCARD but at the same time, be able to use vold.fstab to
enable auto mounting of a usb key. The current implementation doesn't
seem to be able to do that. Would I be wrong?

Cheers,
Stephane.

On Nov 18, 6:18 am, Chih-Wei Huang <cwhu...@android-x86.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have added a new class AutoVolume to vold
> to support auto-mount and fake sdcard.
> The Sdcard HowTo is updated to explain
> all the new features:
>
> http://www.android-x86.org/documents/sdcardhowto
>
> Comparing to other workarounds posted in the group,
> the new implementation is cleaner.
> It handles the SDCARD in cmdline directly
> so the fake sdcard works exactly like
> a real sdcard. For example, you can
> umount, remount, or even format it from the GUI.
> (except SDCARD=premount, which is marked as deprecated)
>
> However, I still appreciate everyone who
> discussed, worked and tested on this issue
> so I can work out the final solution.
>
> Note to take advantage of the new implementation,
> you have to remove /etc/vold.fstab (if exists).
>
> PS. Now we have only one release blocking issue for froyo-x86:
>       the camera crashing. Any volunteer?
>

> 2010/11/16 Chih-Wei Huang <cwhu...@android-x86.org>:

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Hmm, Android doesn't support two (or more) sdcard yet.
If you have an internal sdcard already,
why do you need to mount another usb drive?

2010/11/25 slajeune <stephane....@gmail.com>:

> Thanks for the patch Chih-Wei.
>
> However, we would need to be able to use this AutoVolume with
> vold.fstab.  The reason is that we might want to auto mount an
> internal SDCARD but at the same time, be able to use vold.fstab to
> enable auto mounting of a usb key.  The current implementation doesn't
> seem to be able to do that.  Would I be wrong?

--

[Suman Saraf]

I haven't tried a 2 card setup but the comments in vold.fstab seem to suggest that it supports it.   ## Example of a dual card setup # dev_mount left_sdcard  /sdcard1  auto /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.0 /devices/platform/msm_sdcc.2/mmc_host/mmc1 # dev_mount right_sdcard /sdcard2  auto /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.1 /devices/platform/msm_sdcc.3/mmc_host/mmc1 Suman --- On Thu, 25/11/10, Chih-Wei Huang <cwh...@android-x86.org> wrote:

-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android-x86" group. To post to this group, send email to andro...@googlegroups.com.

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-x86+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Yes, vold supports multiple mount points,
but the Android frameworks doesn't.

That means, even you mount /sdcard1, /sdcard2, ...
the apps can't use them.
(unless you hardcoded the path in your apps)

2010/11/25 Suman Saraf <saraf...@yahoo.com>

>
> I haven't tried a 2 card setup but the comments in vold.fstab seem to suggest that it supports it.
>
> ## Example of a dual card setup
> # dev_mount left_sdcard  /sdcard1  auto /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.0 /devices/platform/msm_sdcc.2/mmc_host/mmc1
> # dev_mount right_sdcard /sdcard2  auto /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.1 /devices/platform/msm_sdcc.3/mmc_host/mmc1
> Suman

--

[Suman Saraf]

You could also possibly symlink different namespaces (i.e. music, images etc.) to different sdcards - that should take care of not having to modify the apps?

--- On Thu, 25/11/10, Chih-Wei Huang <cwh...@android-x86.org> wrote:

From: Chih-Wei Huang <cwh...@android-x86.org> Subject: Re: patch of vold to enable wildcard pathname in vold.fstab and to mount the premounted sdcard To: andro...@googlegroups.com

[slajeune]

Agreed, it doesn't support 2 sdcards but a file manager can. It is
very useful to transfer anything from a usb key to the internal
SDCARD. Using the patch with wildcard as provided by Jinho, I can
easily have two sd cards mounted:

internal -> /dev/sda3 /sdcard
external -> /dev/.../sdb /sdcard2

It would be great if we could replicate this with your patch. It
would also be great if you included the wildcard portion. This is key
when using usb keys.

Cheers,
Stephane.

On Nov 25, 3:25 am, Chih-Wei Huang <cwhu...@android-x86.org> wrote:
> Hmm, Android doesn't support two (or more) sdcard yet.
> If you have an internal sdcard already,
> why do you need to mount another usb drive?
>

> 2010/11/25 slajeune <stephane.lajeune...@gmail.com>:

[sandeep.p.r sandy]

Hi guys,

 I have built a system image for an emulator but when i am trying to open sdcard (from music or gallery), i am getting sdcard not found. 

I also cant find /system/etc/void.fstab file in installed-files.txt. So where do u think i might have gone wrong?