Set partition sizes when flashing

haveaniceday · 18 Oct 2018, 07:55

@vandys I just did this on a M10 frieza an it worked like a charm.

sudo -s
dd if=/dev/null of=/userdata/ubuntu.img bs=1M seek=6000 count=0
resize2fs -f /userdata/ubuntu.img                                            
reboot

How I understand it, it writes zero bytes in the image file after skipping 6GB. This leads to growth of the image file. Then resize2fs is used to grow the ext4 to the full extend of this file. The reboot is necessary to make the kernel aware about the changed filesystem.
Now, the root partition is big enough for all the apt goodness:

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ ls -lash /userdata/ubuntu.img 
2.6G -rw------- 2 root root 5.9G Oct 18 09:34 /userdata/ubuntu.img
phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0      5.8G  2.3G  3.3G  41% /

Warning: could have bad consequences for your phone. Execute the commands without much interruption - especially if your root partition is already mounted rw. You don't want to corrupt your filesystem.

Have fun with it!

vandys · 19 Oct 2018, 01:15

@haveaniceday said in Set partition sizes when flashing:

@vandys I just did this on a M10 frieza an it worked like a charm.

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread". Given your prompting, I did it too (ubuntu.img and
system.img appear to be two links to the same underlying inode) and... success. I now have
lots of room on my partition for any more packages. Very nice! So mark as a workable
technique on Nexus 5, too. Many thanks.

arubislander · 19 Oct 2018, 16:02

@haveaniceday
This worked for me too. Thanks for that.

What I can't seem to figure out though, is where the extra space is being deducted from. I had expected that the free space on /userdata would be reduced, but that doesn't seem to be the case. But this space must be coming at the expence of something, shouldn't it?

halucigenia · 29 Oct 2018, 14:31

I for one, as a user rather than a developer, think that the policy should be that things should be as un-footshootable as possible no matter how much rope that you might give us.

doniks · 29 Oct 2018, 18:01

@halucigenia not to worry. youll be able to sleep easy while youre staying away from commandline tools of which youre not sure what they do like ubports-qa

myii · 19 Nov 2018, 03:10

@haveaniceday Fantastic, thank you very much for this. Another happy Nexus 5 user. After the first reboot, df -h / wasn't showing any change while the ls was. Ran the resize2fs -f /userdata/ubuntu.img again and rebooted a couple more times and finally succeeded. Just in case anyone else has similar issues when attempting this.

L-00117 · 30 Nov 2018, 16:06

This post is deleted!

myii · 27 Dec 2018, 21:31

Apologies to all for the mass call-outs used in this post -- I wouldn't usually do this. I've encountered a situation where extending rootfs and all subsequent customisations are lost. I'm sharing this as a warning for those who have already resized, a caveat for those considering to do so, and as a discussion point for how to move forwards.

Switching the release channel loses the extended `rootfs`

With hindsight, there's nothing surprising about this since the process of switching channels replaces /userdata/ubuntu.img.

@haveaniceday above:

Of course, this will probably break OTA updates...

@UniSuperBox above:

The image file can be resized, and I'm considering ways to make ubports-qa do this in case the user would prefer to use apt and turn off system-image upgrades.

I never had any issues with OTA updates, even after some fairly extensive hacking and customisations. Other than switching the channel, what other system-image upgrades could lead to this outcome?

Moving forward

@haveaniceday above:

I'll just repeat the steps for each release.

Essentially, this is all that can be done. But I managed to do some decent testing and found that this reconfiguration process can be made much easier. In my case, I made promising progress with SaltStack configuration management. Solutions involving tools such as this become viable once rootfs has been extended (in that the necessary packages can be installed). It wouldn't be too difficult to have a repo for collecting formulas that help automate this.

@vandys @arubislander @doniks Since you all appear to have gone through the resizing process, I hope you don't mind me drawing your attention to this post.

myii · 28 Dec 2018, 08:24

One strange experience to share about extending rootfs after switching the release channel. Following the instructions above, using 6000 worked fine for the rc channel. However, after switching to the dev channel, I couldn't get this to work for that value, no matter how many times I resized and rebooted. I did manage to get other sizes to work, though. Ultimately, I settled for 6144 (6 * 1024) to get 6.0GB, i.e.:

dd if=/dev/null of=/userdata/ubuntu.img bs=1M seek=6144 count=0

UniSuperBox · 28 Dec 2018, 16:49

Most system-image upgrades are differential, where only the changes from one image to the next are downloaded and applied. So, any updates in upstream Ubuntu as well as our own packages are changed. If you run sudo apt dist-upgrade, you will already have these newer packages and won't see any changes when the upgrade happens. This could be seen as a bug or a feature depending on who you are. It's a bug in that an image may not be in a known good state after an upgrade.

Upgrades which download a whole system image will always rewrite all of your changes. Full updates will happen in the following scenarios:

You specify a full upgrade to system-image (There's a way to do this, but I'm not sure how at this time)
The system-image-server does not have a diff from the image you are using to the new image (you've skipped a few updates, for example I went from devel 2018-12-21 to 2018-12-28 today and had to download the full image)
You are switching release channels

This is why I said that ubports-qa should disable system-image updates. After you've changed your system image, it is no longer in a known good state and may behave in unexpected ways.

myii · 28 Dec 2018, 20:38

@unisuperbox Fantastic, detailed explanation -- appreciate you taking the time to go through that.

The system-image-server does not have a diff from the image you are using to the new image (you've skipped a few updates, for example I went from devel 2018-12-21 to 2018-12-28 today and had to download the full image)

This leaves me with some food for thought since it appears that I've increased my risk of this happening by switching to the dev channel.

This is why I said that ubports-qa should disable system-image updates. After you've changed your system image, it is no longer in a known good state and may behave in unexpected ways.

Is there a simple way of testing this out in the meantime?

KrisJace · 8 Jan 2019, 09:19

I have been rad with the Nexus5 where rootfs is not constrained by a small physical partition size. I wish all devices could be converted to that layout.
So far I enabled very easy resizing of rootfs via atuTools4UT: https://sourceforge.net/projects/all-things-ubuntu-library/files/releases/

And the related portion in the sourcecode: https://sourceforge.net/p/all-things-ubuntu-library/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/ATUpackages/ATU/ATU-src/atulib.pas#l1329

Currently working on a GUI for also resizing rootfs based on physical partition layout, ie. on Meizu PRO 5. Not sure if I will be able to do it on-device, but am still exploring this possibility, even using pivot chroot method.

rooty · 7 Jan 2019, 21:04

Hi,

Please help me, I'm confused...

So I'm trying to increase my root, did following:

dd if=/dev/null of=/userdata/ubuntu.img bs=1M seek=6144 count=0
e2fsck -p /userdata/ubuntu.img
resize2fs /userdata/ubuntu.img

got this

root@ubuntu-phablet:~# ls -lahi /userdata/
total 3.9G
      2 drwxrwx--x.  5 system      system           4.0K Jul  1 12:08 .
      2 drwxr-xr-x  23 lxc-dnsmasq systemd-timesync 4.0K Apr 30 19:54 ..
1310721 drwxrwx--x  23 system      system           4.0K Jul  1 13:21 android-data
     22 -rw-r--r--   1 root        root                2 Oct 13  1970 .last_ubuntu-build
     21 -rw-rw-rw-   1 root        root                0 Oct 13  1970 .last_update
     13 -rw-------.  1 root        root                2 Jan  7  1970 .layout_version
     11 -rw-------   1 root        root              32M Oct 13  1970 SWAP.img
 131073 drwxr-xr-x   5 root        root             4.0K Oct 13  1970 system-data
     19 -rw-------   2 root        root             6.0G Oct 14  1970 system.img
     19 -rw-------   2 root        root             6.0G Oct 14  1970 ubuntu.img
 655361 drwxr-xr-x   3 root        root             4.0K Oct 13  1970 user-data

root@ubuntu-phablet:/userdata# parted ubuntu.img
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /userdata/ubuntu.img
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Model:  (file)
Disk /userdata/ubuntu.img: 6442MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags:

Number  Start  End     Size    File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  6442MB  6442MB  ext2

already did reboot couple times and still getting

root@ubuntu-phablet:~# df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0      2.0G  1.8G   82M  96% /

my specs:
nexus 5
Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS

p.s.
All Things Ubuntu Library does not work for me

root@ubuntu-phablet:~# ./ATU_arm-linux
./ATU_arm-linux: error while loading shared libraries: libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
root@ubuntu-phablet:~# ldd ./ATU_arm-linux
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.so.0 (0xb6f01000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libdl.so.2 (0xb6eee000)
	libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found
	libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libX11.so.6 (0xb6dfd000)
	libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0xb6dd4000)
	libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found
	libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0xb6d8b000)
	libglib-2.0.so.0 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0xb6cb3000)
	libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgthread-2.0.so.0 (0xb6ca1000)
	libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0xb6c8e000)
	libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0xb6c48000)
	libcairo.so.2 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libcairo.so.2 (0xb6b90000)
	libatk-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0xb6b69000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6 (0xb6a7d000)
	/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 (0xb6f38000)
	libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libxcb.so.1 (0xb6a59000)
	libgio-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgio-2.0.so.0 (0xb6956000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libm.so.6 (0xb68de000)
	libffi.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libffi.so.6 (0xb68c8000)
	libpcre.so.3 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpcre.so.3 (0xb686b000)
	libthai.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libthai.so.0 (0xb6855000)
	libpixman-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpixman-1.so.0 (0xb67cb000)
	libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libfontconfig.so.1 (0xb678e000)
	libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libfreetype.so.6 (0xb6717000)
	libpng12.so.0 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpng12.so.0 (0xb66ef000)
	libxcb-shm.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libxcb-shm.so.0 (0xb66dc000)
	libxcb-render.so.0 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libxcb-render.so.0 (0xb66c4000)
	libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libXrender.so.1 (0xb66ad000)
	libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libXext.so.6 (0xb6692000)
	libz.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libz.so.1 (0xb6670000)
	librt.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/librt.so.1 (0xb665a000)
	libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libXau.so.6 (0xb664e000)
	libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb663a000)
	libselinux.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libselinux.so.1 (0xb6615000)
	libresolv.so.2 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libresolv.so.2 (0xb65f5000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb65cd000)
	libdatrie.so.1 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libdatrie.so.1 (0xb65b8000)
	libexpat.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libexpat.so.1 (0xb6590000)

rooty · 2 Jul 2019, 05:07

ok, so I was not able to accomplish this task from inside my phone, for some reason modified filesystem's size shrinks back to 2GB even tho I run resize2fs few times. Partition was fine tho, it just FS.

For those who's trying to solve this issue:
Was able to change the file system size from a host, connecting the phone to my laptop and running

adb shell  # phone in recovery mode
e2fsck -f -y system.img
resize2fs -fp system.img

simbion · 27 Aug 2019, 11:29

@rooty
I managed to do it to expand the system partition from 2GB to 6GB. Went into recovery mode UBports:
simbion@simbion:~/1$ adb devices
simbion@simbion:~/1$ adb pull /data/system.img
simbion@simbion:~/1$ dd if=/dev/null of=system.img bs=1M seek=6144 count=0
simbion@simbion:~/1$ e2fsck -p system.img
simbion@simbion:~/1$ resize2fs system.img
simbion@simbion:~/1$ adb push system.img /data
The process is not fast. After that, I have all the updates and applications began to be installed. It would be nice if did it in UBports when you install to select how much you need to under system.

dobey · 27 Aug 2019, 13:42

@simbion said in Set partition sizes when flashing:

It would be nice if did it in UBports when you install to select how much you need to under system.

Installing packages with apt and resizing the rootfs is not supported. Nobody needs it, though you might want it.

L-00327 · 11 Sept 2019, 20:11

@dobey then what can you do with ubuntu touch can you run snapd on my oneplus one, it is open source how can I get full space for my apt-get not just reserved for storage? already mounted r/w permanently with one liner $ adb shell

$ sudo touch /userdata/.writable_image

$ sudo reboot
If i could manage to somehow free up this space I'd be gucci for installing full web apps again, this didn't happen when I used to install it with multirom. Does anyone know if deleting the lock file will help thanks

dobey · 11 Sept 2019, 21:05

@errorcodevortex No you can't run snapd on Ubuntu touch.

As stated, if you want to resize the root partition and use apt to install things, it is not supported. You can do it if you want, but it will not be supported.

The goal of Ubuntu Touch is to provide an operating system for phones based on Ubuntu. It is not to provide a traditional PC Linux distro, because phones are not built this way. If what you want is a traditional PC Linux distribution on your phone, with latest kernel and not all hardware working, but enough to do the few specific things you want to run on your device, perhaps you should look at https://postmarketos.org instead.

L-00327 · 9 Dec 2019, 07:08

@dobey Space used to be supported before lol enabled by default, did it change when it turned to ubports or something? now i can't figure out yet how to get more then an extra few gbs of my 64gb available. I had a lot of programs running sucessfully before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHE5THEWq7c this guy managed to install snapd but I'm assuming it was a 64bit device. Tried to do this https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/07/anbox-how-to-install-google-play-store.html but couldn't install the install.sh it seemed only because of snapd.socket error. Heard of plasmamobile but not postmarket os but not trying to build anything from scratch that wont support calling. Might checkit out tho. You can install full linux on the worst computers there really aint no reason it cant be a linux distro and phone on my device. I've ran full kali-linux on this phone. Maybe this the attitude why it hasn't taken off yet, the whole point of linux is open source freedom it seems like developments gone backwards. Am I strictly supposed to use libertine for desktop stuff somehow is that "supported"? I haven't looked into this quite yet just got anbox going.

dobey · 11 Sept 2019, 21:36

@errorcodevortex Your attitude is the problem here, demanding that this small community bend to support your own personal desires. That is not at all what Linux, Open Source, nor most of the communities around them, are about.

Libertine is the supported (albeit still an experimental feature) method of creating a container for installing legacy applications, yes.

If you want an insecure classic Linux distribution on your phone, then Ubuntu Touch is not it, and it never would have been, especially if Canonical had continued developing it in the direction they were going with.

There are plenty of reasons why it can't be a "full linux distro" by your standards, despite your refusal to accept how Android phones are designed and built.

On the other hand, if you do want something that is more like a traditional PC, where things could theoretically work more like how you want, and still want to run UT, then you could look at buying a PinePhone or Librem 5, both of which are not Android based, and therefore much more flexible in how things can work; though using apt to install additional packages and upgrade the system will still not be actively supported, it will work more reliably on such a system where partitioning can be better controlled by us, rather than having to conform to Android designs.

Set partition sizes when flashing

Switching the release channel loses the extended rootfs

Moving forward

Switching the release channel loses the extended `rootfs`