- legacy devices brought up to Android 10 may now use a compressed dt in a hdr_v0 AOSP dt variant extra section, so detect, decompress and recompress this
- so far these have only been done using lz4 compression (latest format revision magic), e.g. LOS 17.1 victara (Moto X)
For match-all-type rules (e.g. "allow magisk * * *" used in Magisk),
we used to iterate and apply rules on all existing types. However, this
is actually unnecessary as all selinux types should have at least 1
attributes assigned to it (process types "domain", file context types
"file_type" etc.). This means in order to create rules that applies to
all types, we actually only need to create rules for all attributes.
This optimization SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the patched sepolicy that is
loaded into the kernel when running Magisk. For example on Pixel 4 XL
running Android R DP4, the sepolicy sizes are
patched (before) : 3455948
patched (after) : 843176
stock : 630229
The active sepolicy size actually impacts the performance of every single
operation in the operating system, because the larger the policies gets,
the longer it takes for the kernel to lookup and match rules.
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.
When detecting device is booting as Safe Mode, disable all modules and
MagiskHide and skip all operations. The only thing that'll be available
in this state is root (Magisk Manager will also be disabled by system).
Since the next normal boot will also have all modules disabled, this can
be used to rescue a device in the case when a rogue module causes
bootloop and no custom recovery is available (or recoveries without
the ability to decrypt data).
Since we no longer need to add new properties in the device tree, and
all the patches we do removes strings, we can just directly patch
the flat device tree in-place, ignoring basically all the higher level
DTB structure and format to accomplish 100% compatibility.
Patching DTBs is proven to be difficult and problematic as there are
tons of different formats out there. Adding support for all the formats
in magiskboot has been quite an headache in the past year, and it still
definitely does not cover all possible cases of them out there.
There is another issue: fake dt fstabs. Some super old devices do not
have device trees in their boot images, so some custom ROM developers
had came up with a "genius" solution: hardcode fstab entries directly
in the kernel source code and create fake device tree nodes even if
Android 10+ init can graciously take fstab files instead (-_-) 。。。
And there is YET another issue: DTBs are not always in boot images!
Google is crazy enough to litter DTBs all over the place, it is like
they cannot make up their minds (duh). This means the dt fstabs can be
either concatnated after the kernel (1), in the DTB partition (2), in
the DTBO partition (3), in the recovery_dtbo section in boot images (4),
or in the dtb section in boot images (5). FIVE f**king places, how can
anyone keep up with that!
With Android 10+ that uses 2 stage inits, it is crutual for Magisk to
be able to modify fstab mount points in order to let the original init
mount partitions for us, but NOT switch root and continue booting. For
devices using dt for early mount fstab, we used to patch the DTB at
install time with magiskboot. However these changes are permanent and
cannot be restored back at reinstallation.
With this commit, Magisk will read dt fstabs and write them to ramdisk
at boot time. And in that case, the init binary will also be patched
to force it to NEVER use fstabs in device-tree. By doing so, we can
unify ramdisk based 2SI fstab patching as basically we are just patching
fstab files. This also means we can manipulate fstab whatever Magisk
needs in the future without the need to going through the headache that
is patching DTBs at installation.
