[YotaPhone] BlackShift:
A short summary of upgrading my YotaPhone 2 to run Magisk v9 on the latest RU lollipop build (1.1.34) because I've seen no threads about Magisk here yet and writing my experience down might help others (or myself in the future).

Background: Got the phone last week from bestgear, and I'm surprised at how great it is. The EPD is much more responsive than I expected. And the phone looks just great! So much has changed/improved in the modding community in the last years (and I got out of touch with it), that I decided to go cutting edge with systemless Xposed through Magisk with root hiding, having no experience with either.

Lollipop

The phone had exactly the same about screen as in the lollipop upgrade thread so I sort-of followed that and subsequently went for the latest Russian version (RU1.1.134).

However, my setup prevented flashing directly to any of the 5.0 versions. The YotaPhoneFlasher showed that flashing /system failed (which can be seen by scrolling up on the prompt about flashing the user data). Probably due to the file size being too large. However, this procedure seemed to do the trick (see above thread for details):

Flash 5.0.0-RU1.1.124. Booting hangs at the 'Powered by Android' screen.

Flash 4.4.3-S01-003-RU1.0.3.61a. Booting succeeds.

Somehow, it now knows that it can perform an OTA update and proceeds through several versions to get to RU1.1.134

Not sure whether the RU version is worth it though, because it adds some bloatware like a Russian NFC payment app, a Russian air plane app and a dictionary app that primarily supports to/from Russian.

TWRP

Subsequently the recovery was flashed to TWRP 2.8.5.0. This seems a rather old version of TWRP though, perhaps too old to flash Magisk v9, see below. (This is my first TWRP experience as well, absolutely fabulous compared to older recoveries!)

Magisk

Magisk v9 refused to install directly. Flashing Magisk-v9.zip always ended up with either "E: footer is wrong" or "E:Error executing updater binary in zip". I tried to 'Install' from TWRP and to 'adb sideload' from both TWRP and modified stock recovery. Googling these errors lead me to believe that it might be related to the TWRP version. (The download was fine, because the zip file was exactly the same as the one that the Magisk Manager installed.)

In the end it was rather simple:

Flash Magisk-v8.zip

Install the magisk version of phh's superuser (and the corresponding Superuser app).

Install Magisk Manager

Upgrade Magisk to v9 from within the manager.

The "Emoji One" module proved that Magisk works (by replacing all the smilies). However, couldn't get Pokemon Go to login, so the root hiding might not work, but I didn't try PoGo before installing Magisk, so could be another issue.

Xposed

My actual goal was experimenting with Xposed, but the Xposed Installer keeps saying that the "Xposed Framework is installed, but not active." I'll keep you posted if I manage to get it working.

Some more notes:

A windows 10 laptop was used for all of the flashing (because the YotaPhoneFlasher software is windows only it seems).

Several reboots and cache/data wipings were omitted from the above. These did make the process take ages though, updating all the apps etc. all the time.

Thank you for all the information on this forum that let me get this far. I'm very happy with having a Lollipop YotaPhone with root.