3 out of 4 samsung devices have too small boot partitions after initramfs changes

Describe your issue

What's the expected behaviour?

pmbootstrap flasher flash_kernel should successfully flash kernel onto device's boot partition

What's the current behaviour?

For a lot of devices the boot partition is smaller than the boot.img, and flashing fails.

How to reproduce your issue?

pmbootstrap init # choose some samsung device
pmbootstrap install
pmbootstrap flasher flash_kernel

In my tests 9 out of 12 samsung devices could not be flashed.

What device are you using?

I tested:

• samsung-jflte, 10 MB boot partition
• samsung-hero{,2}lte, 40 MB boot partition
• samsung-chagallwifi, 8 MB boot partition
• samsung-klimtlte, 8 MB boot partition
• samsung-zerofltexx, 28 MB boot partition
• samsung-zeroltexx, 28 MB boot partition
• samsung-n1awifi, 8 MB boot partition
• samsung-v1awifi, 8 MB boot partition

and found that generated boot.img is too large. For 3 tested devices the boot.img fit:

• samsung-dream, 40 MB boot partition
• samsung-gts210lte, 14 MB boot partition
• samsung-treltexx, 17 MB boot partition

Since devices with as large boot partitions as 40 MB are affected I think issue can happen on basically any device, I guess it depends more on kernel config than on boot partition size.

On what postmarketOS version did you encounter the issue?

• edge (master branch)

• v24.06

• v23.12 (supported until 2024-07-16)

• I confirm that the issue still is present after running sudo apk upgrade -a

On what environment did you encounter the issue?

Environments

• GNOME Shell on Mobile
• Phosh
• Plasma Mobile
• Sxmo (Wayland/Sway) Please post the output of sxmo_version.sh
• Other: Please fill out

How did you get postmarketOS image?

• from https://images.postmarketos.org
• I built it using pmbootstrap
• It was preinstalled on my device

What's the build date of the image? (in yyyy-mm-dd format)

Additional information

Issues were likely introduced in !5000 (closed). !5365 (merged) fixes issue for the devices I tested.

mentioned in merge request !5000 (closed)

By Henrik Grimler on 2024-07-21T08:51:03

Related: !5241 (merged)

By Newbyte on 2024-07-21T09:04:52

I think situation can be improved in two ways:

• Users might try to build and flash to a device where neither the device or linux package has been changed in a long time. Flashing then fails with an error from heimdall: BOOT partition is too small for given file. Use --skip-size-check to flash anyways., and there is no obvious way to find out that the (best) fix is to add postmarketos-initramfs-minimal to depends. A section should be added to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Troubleshooting and a helpful message with link to troubleshooting shown if flash fails. I guess we can check return code of the flash command.

• The android-recovery-zip should verify that images fit the partitions before dd'ing. Right now it happily just truncates the boot.img and prints a dd: writing to '/dev/mmcblk1p2': No space left on device error and continues overwrites the following partition if partition is too small (I think, my dd-fu is a bit weak). Since android-recovery-zip method works when heimdall flash doesn't users might use that method instead of fixing the core issue of boot.img being too large. See for example discussion in the open gtexswifi MR: !5289 (comment 1998830254). When updating android-recovery-zip installer we can then also show a helpful message if partition is too small.

By Henrik Grimler on 2024-07-30T15:13:09

Thanks for taking the time to make this issue, I think both of these suggestions are great!

Just a suggestion, but if you turn those into some markdown checklist(s) in the issue description, then it might be easier for folks to see what's left to do so patches can be made, and we can track them/tick boxes

By clayton craft on 2024-07-23T23:30:16

mentioned in merge request !5289 (merged)

By Henrik Grimler on 2024-07-21T12:08:40

changed title from 3 out of 4 samsung devices have too small boot partitions to 3 out of 4 samsung devices have too small boot partitions after initramfs changes

By Henrik Grimler on 2024-07-22T20:15:00

There is no problem when boot.img flashed with twrp

By 19atlas on 2024-07-27T18:19:43

I got curious how many devices could be affected by this, and decided to try to gather some information on boot partition sizes on various Android devices.

Android device config repos (android_device_manufacturer_codename) usually have the value stored as BOARD_BOOTIMAGE_PARTITION_SIZE in BoardConfig.mk. I wrote a script to find the repos on GitHub and get the config from there; from 471 devices in testing (many of which are non-Android devices) the script managed to get data for 286 of them. (Note that I haven't manually vetted the output of the script.)

Out of these 286, the following 74 have boot partitions under 16MB (codename - size in bytes):

Click to expand

samsung-matissewifi 10485760
samsung-kylevess 8388608
samsung-i9100g 8388608
samsung-apexq 10485760
samsung-klte 13631488
lg-p700 8388608
htc-vision 4194304
samsung-p4note 8388608
samsung-s6500d 12582912
motorola-thea 10444800
samsung-i927 8388608
htc-golfu 4194304
samsung-jflte 10485760
samsung-kylepro 6934528
hisense-m470bsa 8388608
htc-leo 5242880
samsung-d2vzw 10485760
samsung-heatqlte 13631488
samsung-j5x 13631488
htc-bravo 2621440
samsung-baffinlite 8388608
samsung-ariesve 5242880
amazon-thor 10485760
samsung-v1awifi 8388608
samsung-matisseve 13631488
samsung-jfvelte 10485760
samsung-n2awifi 8388608
samsung-arubaslim 12582912
samsung-kyle 6934528
samsung-n1awifi 8388608
motorola-condor 10444800
samsung-serranodsdd 10485760
htc-vivo 4194304
samsung-degaswifi 12582912
samsung-kylessopen 12582912
lg-vee7e 10485760
samsung-kminilte 10485760
samsung-lt023g 12582912
samsung-serranolte 10485760
samsung-milletwifi 10485760
htc-enrc2b 8388608
samsung-royss 12582912
htc-primou 5194304
samsung-s3ve3g 10485760
huawei-g7 12582912
zte-kis3 10485760
lg-dory 14485760
huawei-y530 12288000
samsung-i9100 8388608
ouya-ouya 8388608
xiaomi-cancro 16384000
samsung-kccat6 13631488
samsung-logands 8388608
samsung-superior 8388608
samsung-hlte 11534336
zte-p731a20 11534336
htc-ace 4194304
samsung-afyonltecan 10485760
amazon-soho 6835024
motorola-titan 10444800
motorola-falcon 10485760
samsung-expressatt 10485760
samsung-cprime 13631488
samsung-t0lte 8155136
samsung-k3gxx 13631488
samsung-ms013g 10485760
samsung-matisselte 10485760
samsung-klimtlte 8388608
samsung-nevisp 8388608
samsung-chagallwifi 8388608
samsung-kyleprods 8388608
samsung-t03g 8388608
acer-picasso 8388608
lg-e610 8388608

While this isn't necessarily related to boot partition size as proven in this issue, smaller partition sizes are more likely to run out of space, so this is an useful metric to keep in mind.

The full output of my script: output.csv (CSV format: codename, size in bytes, GitHub source (points to device repo, sometimes the boot partition size is in BoardConfigCommon.mk in which case a common repo with a name matching the include path from the same user as the found device repo is used)).

The script itself, in case anyone would like to iterate on it: get_bootsize.py (note that it is very messy!). Create a file called github-token.txt and place a GitHub personal access token in it to use it.

By knuxify on 2024-07-30T15:13:55

• samsung-gtexswifi BOARD_BOOTIMAGE_PARTITION_SIZE 16777216
• https://github.com/underscoremone/android_device_samsung_gtexswifi/blob/cm-14.1/BoardConfig.mk#L25

By 19atlas on 2024-07-30T06:42:38

added initramfs kernel-config labels

mentioned in issue #3232

this shouldn't be a problem any more if you set deviceinfo_create_initfs_extra="true" and make sure the kernel image for the device is small. Anyways, closing this issue since it's not very specific. Please open a new issue for each device/kernel that needs to be adjusted if this is still a problem.

closed