The initial problem
To update to the latest SailfishOS, you’ll need a bit over 500MB free space. Shouldn’t be a problem on a modern phone, should it? Well, for whatever reason Jolla gives the rootfs only 2.5Gb of space and addresses the rest to the home partition. So when you’ve installed a few more apps, you’ll sooner or later run out of space. You could remove a bunch of apps and try to install them again after the update, but you’ll face the same problem with the next update again. Shrinking the home logical volume would be an option, but maybe we also run low on space on this partition.
Luckily, most Sailfish X devices have a partition left over from Android which is completely unused. Newer Android phones have partitions labelled system_a and system_b, which were used by deliver OS updates as full partitions without overwriting the used one. On next reboot, Android just switches the partition to boot from. SailfishOS only uses system_b, as it doesn’t provide kernel updates. So let’s use system_a instead of wasting its space.
But does this work on all SailfishOS devices?
No, it doesn’t. If your phone only has a /dev/disk/by-partlabel/system partition. If it has unused spaces, you could shrink it and create another partition to do the same, but I don’t know for sure. If your system has a /dev/disk/by-partlabel/system_a and a /dev/disk/by-partlabel/system_b, this guide will work one by one for you. For example, the Xperia X has only a system partition and the Xperia XA2 does have a system_a and a system_b partition. so it won’t work on the X but will work on the XA2. I don’t know how it’s on newer devices, if you find out, please let me know.
Additionally, you won’t be able to reflash SailfishOS without reflashing Android first. I’ll release a blogpost how you can do that without having to install Windows and the Sony EMMA tool soon. Updating SailfishOS without reflashing it is absolutely fine.
Preparations
As always, it’s good to have a backup first, in case you miss up somehow anyway. Since SailfishOS is effectively Linux, I’m using restic, but you can use whatever tool you like. Additionally, you need shell access on your Sailfish device which you get by enabling the development mode, but that’s it.
Let’s do it.
First of all, change to root user, which is required for all operations. Do that by entering devel-su in the command line. Afterwards, you’ll need to enter your root password, which is changeable in the same place as where the development mode can be activated.
Add the partition to LVM
To start, you have to add /dev/disk/by-partlabel/system_a to the Logical Volume Manager.
- Enter
pvcreate /dev/disk/by-partlabel/system_a to prepare the partition for LVM.
- Secondly, type
vgextend sailfish /dev/disk/by-partlabel/system_a to add the partition to the sailfish volume group.
If you get messages similar to this:
/dev/mmcblk0rpmb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4186112: Input/output error
Don’t worry. mmcblk0rpmb stands for Replay Protected Memory Block, which is a security storage feature of Android not used by SailfishOS. When the programs you just executed scan all partitions, they won’t be able to read this secure storage, hence the error message.
Extend the sailfish root filesystem
Now, the space of the sailfish volume group is extended by the size of the system_a partition and we can continue with adding the new free space of the volume group to the root volume.
- This is done with
lvextend sailfish/root -l +100%Free, which tells LVM to assign all free space in the sailfish volume group to the root volume.
- In the end, we resize the root filesystem to the new size of the
root volume by entering resize2fs /dev/mapper/sailfish-root. This can be done while the filesystem is mounted, which is a nice feature of ext4.
Now you can proceed with installing apps or starting the system update!
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