Bootloop after privileged mode enabled

After enabling privileged mode F-Droid disappeared from app drawer so I rebooted my phone. It ended in a bootloop. Fortunately recovery mode still worked.

Sony Xperia Z, Stock Lollipop 5.0.2, rooted with SuperSu, F-Droid 0.95

Very possible duplicate of #294 (closed), but leaving it open for now since the symptoms are different.

mentioned in issue fdroiddata#280 (closed)

Just a quick report: Same exact thing here on my Xperia Z3 Compact, Stock Android 5.1.1, SuperSU, F-Droid 0.95.

Same issue on Z1 compact, Stock Lollipop 5.0.2, rooted with SuperSu 2.48

To get rid of the bootloop I had to boot into recovery and delete the /system/priv-app/FDroid directory.

Has anyone figured yet exactly what is causing the bootloop? So far the only information we have is that it has something to do with /system/priv-app/FDroid/ (on 5.X), since removing the directory fixes it.

My best guess for now is that the process didn't complete successfuly and it's making the Android startup process crash. For example, I could see the bootloop occuring due to the app optimizer crashing if an apk in /system/priv-app/ is malformed, e.g. due to a corrupt apk file. Maybe the cat (copy) command didn't end successfully?

@dschuermann is there a way to check if all the commands ran successfully and returned 0? Maybe join them via && and add something that says OK at the end, or writes to a file, then check that file? Rebooting without making sure that all the changes succeeded seems wrong.

@mvdan You could do this for some commands but not for all. Looking at https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/blob/master/F-Droid/src/org/fdroid/fdroid/installer/InstallIntoSystem.java#L88 : Some commands are executed after F-Droid has been stopped. So you can't check for their return values, i.e., everything after https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/blob/master/F-Droid/src/org/fdroid/fdroid/installer/InstallIntoSystem.java#L97 But it should be possible to verify that the copy command has worked.

I'm mostly worried about the mount, copy/move and packagemanager commands, so that's a good start :) I'll look into it.

mentioned in issue #363 (closed)

Created a separate issue for that.

Is this still an issue in alpha2? I pushed some fixes that might have fixed this.

Sorry it took so long to answer, busy week. I could finally test it and the issue is fixed in 0.96 alpha 3. Nice!

Thank you!

Status changed to closed

Milestone changed to 0.96

This is still an issue on the Xperia Z3 d6616

@kingofuruk what F-Droid version?

I am using 0.96 (not alpha) and after installation as a privileged FDroid is moved to /system/priv-app/FDroid as FDroid.apk.tmp. Renaming and rebooting solves this problem.

I see. Please refer to #363 (closed), which will solve this. It will basically stop if any commands fail, which is most probably what happened here. Either the copy or the rename failed, and we should not be rebooting if that happens.

@mvdan F-Droid 0.95.1

@kingofuruk 0.96 adds some fixes, but it's still not completely stable. Refer to #363 (closed) as explained above :)