Phones
Android 13 upcoming devices may support ‘Seamless Updates’
According to revealer Mishaal Rahman, Android 13 may require A/B partitions to seamlessly update the system. A/B partition is a mechanism first introduced in Android 7.0, and the system exists in both A and B partitions.
When the A partition updates the system, the user can continue to use the B partition, and then restart to the A partition, thus saving the time of system update, so it is also called seamless update.
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In addition, when the system file of the A partition is damaged, the user can also switch to the B partition to continue using it, which reduces the probability that the mobile phone cannot be used.
Although Google has been promoting A/B partitions, and even wants to force it when Android 11 is released, some OEMs are not very interested, such as Samsung, until this year’s Galaxy S22 series still does not support A/B partitions.
The Android version was merged before the release, so the promotion determination this time is much stronger than Android 11. Additionally, Google is making further improvements to virtual A/B in Android 13.
For example, XOR compression further reduces snapshot size by 25-40%, and switching to dm-user for userspace merges can significantly reduce compression merge times. Google is also experimenting with deploying Linux’s io_uring feature, which, according to benchmarks, reduces snapback times by about 40 percent.