Yes, /system being read-only is a standard situation on Android. On some 
devices, you can perform mount -o remount,rw /system to get it RW, but there 
are some drawbacks on some devices:

* Some devices come with NAND lock. This was (is?) usually the case of HTC 
devices and it is likely also the case of Anbox – since snaps contain RO 
images, it seems to be the natural way to implement it.
* Some devices use dm-verity to reject booting of tampered system. This is the 
case of BlackBerry, but more vendors are likely to go this way, because this 
isn't specific for BlackBerry. But I doubt Anbox goes this way.
* Even if you manage to modify /system and then to boot, you are going to have 
troubles with updates. You can think of /data and /system in Android as rough 
equivalents of /rw and / in template-based VMs in Qubes. There are some 
differences (different update mechanisms and no CoW snapshot in Android), but 
the basic principles are the same. Moreover, in Android, you usually exchange 
one vendor-provided /system for another vendor-provided /system image (even if 
you use incremental update), so, unlike template-based VMs, you cannot easily 
customize it this way.

If you don't want to touch /system, you can go several ways:

* mount --bind (and manage its content to be up-to-date)
* mount -t tmpfs and copy old content (I probably have some script for that)
* modify / – this is a ramdisk you can write to after performing mount -o 
remount,rw / and there is even some directory on $PATH.

In all those cases, your modification gets lost after reboot. But you can write 
some script like adb wait-for-device && adb shell su -c /data/busybox/install. 
You will probably want to run this script as user in order not to have troubles 
with permissions when using adb later.

Specifically for busybox, its installation consists of just two steps:

1. Copy it to some directory on $PATH.
2. Install symlinks (IIRC by the following command: busybox --install 
/directory/to/install)

Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"qubes-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/168560fb-7d50-4403-bf0a-ba95bcd7c3ca%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to