On devices where the primary storage is slow to probe it makes sense to
wait forever for the system partition to mount, this emulates the
kernel's behaviour when waiting for rootfs on SAR if the rootwait
parameter is supplied.
This issue was encountered with some SD cards on the Nintendo Switch.
It is possible that a module is breaking the device so bad that zygote
cannot even be started. In this case, system_server cannot start and
detect the safe mode key combo, set the persist property, and reboot.
Also on old Android versions, the system directly goes to safe mode
after detecting a key combo without rebooting, defeating the purpose of
Magisk's safe mode protection if we only check for the persist property.
Directly adding key combo check natively in magiskd allows us to enter
Magisk safe mode before the system is even aware of 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.
