Usually, the communication between native and the app is done via
sending intents to either broadcast or activity. These communication
channels are for launching root requests dialogs, sending root request
notifications (the toast you see when an app gained root access), and
root request logging.
Sending intents by am (activity manager) usually requires specifying
the component name in the format of <pkg>/<class name>. This means parts
of Magisk Manager cannot be randomized or else the native daemon is
unable to know where to send data to the app.
On modern Android (not sure which API is it introduced), it is possible
to send broadcasts to a package, not a specific component. Which
component will receive the intent depends on the intent filter declared
in AndroidManifest.xml. Since we already have a mechanism in native code
to keep track of the package name of Magisk Manager, this makes it
perfect to pass intents to Magisk Manager that have components being
randomly obfuscated (stub APKs).
There are a few caveats though. Although this broadcasting method works
perfectly fine on AOSP and most systems, there are OEMs out there
shipping ROMs blocking broadcasts unexpectedly. In order to make sure
Magisk works in all kinds of scenarios, we run actual tests every boot
to determine which communication method should be used.
We have 3 methods in total, ordered in preference:
1. Broadcasting to a package
2. Broadcasting to a specific component
3. Starting a specific activity component
Method 3 will always work on any device, but the downside is anytime
a communication happens, Magisk Manager will steal foreground focus
regardless of whether UI is drawn. Method 1 is the only way to support
obfuscated stub APKs. The communication test will test method 1 and 2,
and if Magisk Manager is able to receive the messages, it will then
update the daemon configuration to use whichever is preferable. If none
of the broadcasts can be delivered, then the fallback method 3 will be
used.
Old Qualcomn devices have their own special QC table of DTB to
store device trees. Since patching fstab is now mandatory on Android 10,
and for older devices all early mount devices have to be included into
the fstab in DTBs, patching QCDT is crucial for rooting Android 10
on legacy devices.
Close#1876 (Thanks for getting me aware of this issue!)
The state of ROM A/B OTA addon.d-v2 support is an inconsistent mess currently:
- LineageOS builds userdebug with permissive update_engine domain, OmniROM builds userdebug with a more restricted update_engine domain, and CarbonROM builds user with a hybrid closer to Omni's
- addon.d-v2 scripts cannot function to the full extent they should when there is a more restricted update_engine domain sepolicy in place, which is likely why Lineage made update_engine completely permissive
Evidence for the above:
- many addon.d-v2 scripts only work (or fully work) on Lineage, see below
- Magisk's addon.d-v2 script would work on Lineage without issue, but would work on Carbon and Omni only if further allow rules were added for basic things like "file read" and "dir search" suggesting these ROMs' addon.d-v2 is severely limited
- Omni includes a /system/addon.d/69-gapps.sh script with the ROM itself (despite shipping without GApps), and with Magisk's more permissive sepolicy and no GApps installed it will remove important ROM files during OTA, resulting in a bootloop; the issue with shipping this script was therefore masked by Omni's overly restrictive update_engine sepolicy not allowing the script to function as intended
The solution:
- guarantee a consistent addon.d-v2 experience for users across ROMs when rooted with Magisk by making update_engine permissive as Lineage has
- hopefully ROMs can work together to come up with something standard for unrooted addon.d-v2 function
Directly read from urandom instead of using std::random_device.
libc++ will use iostream under-the-hood, which brings significant
binary size increase that is not welcomed, especially in magiskinit.
- while many newer devices cannot allow / (system partition) to be mounted rw due to compressed fs (e.g. erofs) or logical partitions, it should remain possible to alter rootfs files/directories on those that previously allowed it
The way how logical partition, or "Logical Resizable Android Partitions"
as they say in AOSP source code, is setup makes it impossible to early
mount the partitions from the shared super partition with just
a few lines of code; in fact, AOSP has a whole "fs_mgr" folder which
consist of multiple complex libraries, with 15K lines of code just
to deal with the device mapper shenanigans.
In order to keep the already overly complicated MagiskInit more
managable, I chose NOT to go the route of including fs_mgr directly
into MagiskInit. Luckily, starting from Android Q, Google decided to
split init startup into 3 stages, with the first stage doing _only_
early mount. This is great news, because we can simply let the stock
init do its own thing for us, and we intercept the bootup sequence.
So the workflow can be visualized roughly below:
Magisk First Stage --> First Stage Mount --> Magisk Second Stage --+
(MagiskInit) (Original Init) (MagiskInit) +
+
+
...Rest of the boot... <-- Second Stage <-- Selinux Setup <--+
(__________________ Original Init ____________________)
The catch here is that after doing all the first stage mounting, /init
will pivot /system as root directory (/), leaving us impossible to
regain control after we hand it over. So the solution here is to patch
fstab in /first_stage_ramdisk on-the-fly to redirect /system to
/system_root, making the original init do all the hard work for
us and mount required early mount partitions, but skips the step of
switching root directory. It will also conveniently hand over execution
back to MagiskInit, which we will reuse the routine for patching
root directory in normal system-as-root situations.
- Magisk "dirty" flashes would remove the /overlay directory which might have been put there by a custom kernel or other mod
- this is a leftover from when Magisk itself used /overlay for placing init.magisk.rc, so just remove this file specifically and leave the rest intact
The current system-as-root magiskinit implementation (converting
root directory in system partition to legacy rootfs setup) is now
considered as backwards compatible only.
The new implementation that is hide and Android Q friendly is coming soon.
- when input image had a compressed ramdisk magiskboot had no way to force the repack with the uncompressed ramdisk.cpio since it does not formally recognize cpio as its own format, so add a switch to support forcing repacking to any possible ramdisk format regardless of input image
- when input image had a different supported format (e.g. gzip) magiskboot would not accept a manually compressed ramdisk or kernel in an unsupported format (e.g. lzop) despite being able to recognize it, so instead would double compress using whatever the input format was, breaking the image with, in effect, a ramdisk.cpio.lzo.gz
