[OE-core] [RFC PATCH 1/2] android-tools: import android-tools from meta-smartphone into oe-core

[Otavio Salvador]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Nicolas Dechesne
<nicolas.dechesne at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Assuming that make_ext4fs is a tool to create an ext4 file system,
>>> what's the difference between that and our mke2fs which is used to
>>> create ext4 file systems?
>>>
>> We've worked quite hard to land the ext4 rootfs creation code into
>> upstream e2fsprogs. I'd like to understand if we're missing anything for
>> that to work with fastboot. If we are, I suspect it wouldn't be hard to
>> add and should save maintenance of a separate tool (support in e2fsprogs
>> means we get any other ext* improvements for free).
>
> thanks for the feedback.
>
> I sent this as RFC , because I wanted to initiate a discussion... I
> decided to simply move existing recipes from meta-smartphone/android
> for that purpose.
>
> compared to 'regular' ext4 images , fastboot added the (convenient)
> ability to support sparse images, to reduce the size of what is
> transmitted over the USB, when flashing (and reduce the size of
> writting to eMMC). For devices with 8GB+ eMMC that is a big deal
> whether we flash a raw ext4 image, or its sparse'd version. More info
> about fastboot sparse format at [1].

It does help for images it seems; did you see if someone has propose a
patch for e2fstools to enable this?

-- 
Otavio Salvador                             O.S. Systems
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