syvaidya / linux-amlogic-toolkit

Allows to unpack and repack AMLogic images for Android 7 without the Customization Tool

Linux AMLogic Toolkit

Allows to unpack and repack AMLogic Android images on Linux systems without using the Customization Tool - works for Android 9.

Features

• Unpack and repack any image
• Mount and edit system, vendor, product and odm partitions
• Unpack and repack logo partition (for bootup and upgrading logos)
• Unpack and repack boot image and initrd ramdisk
• Unpack and repack recovery image
• Flash the image directly to a device without repacking it (faster than using the USB Burning Tool)
• Works for Android 9
• No need to unpack the image each time you want to use the tool

Dependencies

• zlib1g-dev for simg2img and img2simg
• libblkid-dev for abootimg (unpacking and repacking boot image)
• the i386 packages if needed (for the logo unpacking / repacking binary)

How to use it

• Clone or download this repository
• Install the dependencies
• Move to the directory of the repository, and stay there
• (first time, or after a cleanup) Run ./bin/build to build the required tools
• (when editing a new image file) Run ./bin/unpack input.img to unpack input.img
• The result is :
  • output/image : raw image files (PARTITION files)
  • output/system : system partition files
  • output/vendor : vendor partition files
  • output/product : product partition files
  • output/odm : odm partition files
  • output/logo : logo partition files
  • output/boot : boot partition files
  • output/recovery : recovery partition files
• From now on you can edit the files of the output directory
  • Note that those files will be overwritten when repacking :
    • output/image/system.PARTITION
    • output/image/vendor.PARTITION
    • output/image/product.PARTITION
    • output/image/odm.PARTITION
    • output/image/logo.PARTITION
    • output/image/boot.PARTITION
    • output/image/recovery.PARTITION
    • output/boot/initrd.img if using ./bin/extract_initrd
  • If you happen to loose the output/system (or vendor, product, odm) mounting point (after a reboot for instance), just run ./bin/remount to mount those again
  • On the other hand, you can unmount the partitions using ./bin/unmount
  • If you want to extract the initrd ramdisk, use the ./bin/extract_initrd and ./bin/recreate_initrd scripts (output in output/initrd)
• Be careful :
  • Don't break everything by chmod'ing the whole output/system folder, because it will be replicated in the image and it won't boot !
  • Don't rename the files in output/boot.img
  • If you extract and recreate the initrd ramdisk, its size will change and it will most likely break the boot image. To fix this, edit the bootimg.cfg file in output/boot to replicate the change in size (you can repack the image, let it fail and read the logs to see the new size).
• When you have finished editing the files, run ./bin/repack output.img to repack the image to output.img
• Additionally, you can use ./bin/flash to flash the image to a device through USB (you will need the udev rule, see https://github.com/Stane1983/aml-linux-usb-burn)
  • The device type (gxl) is hardcoded into the flashing script, edit it if you're not using S905, S905X or S919
• Done !

Troubleshooting

• If you have a file not found error when trying to unpack and repack the logo partition, install the i386 libraries by following the accepted answer of this post : https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13391/getting-not-found-message-when-running-a-32-bit-binary-on-a-64-bit-system

Credits

• Thanks to Magendanz and adg for the unpacking and repacking method
• https://github.com/khadas/utils for the aml_image_v2_packer and logo_img_packer binaries
• https://github.com/anestisb/android-simg2img for the simg2img tool
• https://github.com/ggrandou/abootimg for the abootimg tool
• https://github.com/Stane1983/aml-linux-usb-burn for the flashing tool