[Android Software/Hacking General [Developers Only]] osm0sis:
A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes lately. Anyone following me on GitHub will have some inkling of what I'm working on, but I'm doing a lot of research and coding basically from scratch and it will likely be some time before some of my newest goodies are ready for release since this is all spare time. I did get the full Nougat bring-up for mkbootfs and mkbootimg/unpackbootimg completed, including backporting some functionality from Python to C, and some custom fixes for Nougat + Pixel support, and with that I'm starting to update some of my other projects that use these and my busybox binaries.

Here are a couple updates and things in the meantime. ;)

Nexus Media Installer will require some explanation. I'm sure everyone's familiar with all the crazy numerous and terrible sounding notification/ringtone/system sounds that AOSP+CM include, and some less-than-desireable boot animations floating around. Lamenting the loss of Google's much more reasonable Nexus sounds and visuals when switching to Nougat on my N5 and N7 '13, I decided to throw together a zip to restore the Google /system/media directories for these recently-retired Nexus devices (I didn't go back to any older Nexus devices since each one adds another 6mb to the zip, but I'll probably add newly-retired ones going forward). There is user choice by renaming the zip, see the feature list below for further details, but for example I use "UPDATE-Nexus.Media.Installer-hammerhead-system-signed.zip" on my N5 (since, while being systemlessly rooted, I use unrooted regularly to pass SafetyNet checks) and "UPDATE-Nexus.Media.Installer-flo-signed.zip" on my N7 '13 which is systemlessly rooted.

I work on these projects in my limited time off, so if you like the progress I'm making, or enjoy anything else I've done on xda, please do hit the donate link from my profile. Thanks for your support!

UPDATE-Nexus.Media.Installer-signed.zip:

- systemless root support to bind mount /system/media as a whole from /su/media via su.d script

- on unrooted or system root, removes /system/media and pushes the Nexus versions and an addon.d script to retain them if the ROM supports this

- contains hammerhead and flo/deb media, reading the zip filename for "hammerhead", "flo" or "deb" to choose (defaulting to hammerhead)

- system install can be forced (despite systemless root detection) by adding "system" to the zip filename

UPDATE-Flashlt.Installer.v2.5-signed.zip:

- updated busybox binary (1.25.1) with my latest build

- updated /su mount script

- fix flashіt shortcut execution on Nougat shell (doesn't allow cross-device symlinks to work anymore)

- fix trim for certain cases where it would previously fail

- refactor flashіt.sh with improved command-line handling and some vague modularity of functions

- add --trim argument and trimit.sh wrapper script to allow trim-only on any supplied file

- add --help argument to flashіt shortcut and and all Flashlt .sh scripts

AnyKernel2 was updated with full Nougat+Pixel support and a major improvement to workflow for devs, and GN Synapse Injector Addon zip saw another minor update to bring the latest AK2 commits to it.

Edit

: Nexus Media now includes shamu, volantis, bullhead and angler media as the final Nexus devices, with bullhead as the default. The special options may be set by adding keywords to the filename or to the contents of /data/.nexusmedia (necessary for Magisk Manager installs) and are system to force a system install, and noreplace to only add to ringtone/sound media rather than replace it all with the Nexus media.

Lastly, since Magisk changed the timing of its simple early mounts, whether bootanimation works on your device depends on whether your device loads it before the post-fs-data stage of the boot process. Many devices work still, but many now do not. You can force a system install on affected devices to replace the bootanimation.