Re:An Unbelievable Demo
by milankragujevic on Friday June 04, 2021 @04:05AM
(#27391639)
It can go worse - some cheap and badly designed Android phones which download updates from every month when you first buy it until the current month, so maybe 10+ updates, but they aren't deltas (diffs) but full images. Ridiculous on so many levels.
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| on HN ]
It’s because they only tested updates from one version to the next, and not every version to every newer version.
It is a complete image, but phones today have nontrivial state that may be a problem - e.g. your baseband processor might have its own rom with its own update protocol, which changed between image 2 and image 7, so image 10 after image 1 will be unable to update the baseband.
If it's a cheap phone, I'd rather them do something brute force but reliable than try and be clever when they know they don't have the budget to QA it.
I honestly consider that a pretty reasonable trade-off.