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No snapshotting at all? Thinking about it.. The filesystem does not support it I suppose.
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Oh cool. I was a bit confused about not using snapshots and relying on symlinks but it couldn't be so simple. I guess it's just a simple userspace cow mount. https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/virtual_ab#compress...
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not surprised about the chrome part, but pretty shocked at the phone OS part. I know APFS migration was done in this way, but wouldn't storage considerations for this be massive?
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what would be more massive would be phones not booting up because of a botched update. this way you can just switch back to the old partition
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Not really, because only the OS core is swapped in this way. Apps and data live in their own partitions/subvolumes, which are mutable and shared between OS versions.

The OS core is deployed as a single unit and is a few GB in size, pretty small when internal storage is into the hundreds of GB.

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