[Milestone XT720 Android Development] appagom:
hellmonger asked me to repost this as a new thread. I'm not entirely sure he wasn't pulling my chain.. but whatever... here it is.

There's development going on for kernel's that can't be flashed anyway. So every time you boot your phone you need your PC handy for fastboot... fun experiment, but no thanks.

Support for ext2/3/4, and any of the other modular changes the kernel mods do can probably be made (and possibly even made useful) without changing the actual kernel image (flashed or otherwise).

I now see it's not like nobody here thought of this (and I didn't mean to presume otherwise), example here:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=929871

The point that I did add was:

From my samsung experience, one click lag fix mounted /data without modifying the kernel by replacing the splash screen binary, which came up before data was mounted needed (other things used this trick too). It's not near as elegant but it may be possible to place kernel modules in /system/extramodules or whatever load them at some time like that, and then get support from then on.

The file on samsung was called playlogos or playlogos1 depending on the device. It did more than just play a logo I think.. and actually it had to be moved, replaced with a script.. and the script then should run the moved copy in the end. I don't see this file on the Motorola, but maybe there is something similar. If being clever, you make the script copy another script in from the sd card, chmod it and run it. Then if you make changes to the real script that cause boot loops, you can just modify it on the sd card, or pull it.

This would then be something that doesn't require a PC to do. Obviously anything requiring changing the actual kernel zImage won't work.

It's not beautiful, but neither is fastboot. For korean sgs it was possible to compile kernel modules for ext4 that would run on the stock kernel. (you should read through that thread I linked though.. some good point made there about that).

If you want to use another filesystem for your primary (as opposed to linked) /data there are some important details that I'm no longer remembering perfectly. The typical boot loop check for /data happened after this splash screen so that was ok, but it was I think still necessary to have the kernel not fail to mount /data before that (Probably the partition will get reformatted if it can't be mounted). If so, one possibility may be to repartition to make a tiny fake data partition and then remount the real one, just and idea. The reason things worked for OCLF was that OCLF left /data partition unmodified, but mounted an ext2 image file sitting on /data, arguably not an appealing thing to do, but it had its uses on Samsung devices depending who you asked.

Mioze7ae since pointed out in passing though that partition tables are burned into the kernel, so this repartition trick may still be a no-go. Anyway I don't know exactly what goals people have for using various filesystems on XT720 devices, and filesystems are not the only modular changes being made to some of these kernels that maybe don't need to be in-kernel, in a flashing sense.

I probably don't intend to be a primary developer on anything this involved... no time, just ideas, testing, etc at most.