ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rodney Dawes <rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you really need to install some command line tools on your phone for
some reason, or you need to compile something on your phone, the best
way to do it, is with a chroot on the data partition, rather than by
making the root partition, which has very limited space, writable.

See my answer to this question[1] on Ask Ubuntu, for details on how to
set up a chroot for doing such development work in. The only issue here
is that you can't do "sudo chroot" from within the Terminal app itself,
due to confinement rules, but it works fine over adb/ssh.


[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/620740



On Fri, 2015-07-17 at 14:34 +0100, John McAleely wrote:
> With the release of OTA-4 a few weeks ago, we received a few reports
> of problems where the handset would get stuck in a boot loop, or
> refuse to boot past the initial logo.
> 
> 
> One root cause we have established is when the system partition has
> run out of space.
> 
> 
> Given that the supported model for system updates is that only the
> system-image-updater writes to this space, it does not display a
> warning in the case when the disk has been filled by something else.
> 
> 
> We've got to this root cause unfortunately quite late in the ota-5
> cycle, so we didn't have time to land any engineering fixes (indeed,
> we're still discussing what might be possible).
> 
> 
> Of course, if your system partition has been writable, I think you
> have taken on some measure of responsibility for looking after your
> phone, so can you do something before an OTA? Yes - you can check for
> a reasonable amount of free space.
> 
> 
> If you've made your system writable, I'm going to assume you can use
> terminal or adb on the command line.
> 
> 
> Use df to see how much space you have:
> 
> 
> $ df -h
> /dev/mmcblk0p6                               2.0G  1.6G  460M  78% /
> <more lines skipped>
> 
> 
> You only need to be concerned with the space assigned to / (rightmost
> column). The other columns may differ on each machine. Here you can
> see the results from my machine, and from a 2G partition, around 460M
> is free. This will be fine for OTA update, since this machine has only
> ever had a read-only system partition.
> 
> 
> Specifying how much space you need for an OTA update is tricky - once
> you've made your disk writeable, maybe the OTA will need a different
> amount of space, because some of the files you've updated share
> footprint with OTA delivered files.
> 
> 
> If you use your system in a writeable mode, and have had OTA updates
> delivered successfully, please comment here with how much disk space
> you have/had free.
> 
> 
> J

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