✏ Porting TWRP recovery

afaik it restores to the already encrypted partition so it should still be encrypted with the same password/code.

Confirm that, restore an already encrypted userdata partition, the encryption is preserved.

I did a little testing: Basically, backup / restore from the encrypted userdata partition works wonderful. Only if the exported backup should also to be encrypted, twrp seems to hang.

I haven’t read the whole thread, but is there somewhere a build with support for mounting an encrypted /data and support for the new screens?

I tried the ones from twrp.me and from @z3ntu: They only display a blue screen for me.

The TWRP that is included in the FPOSOS ZIP file displays correctly and is usable, but can’t mount an encrypted /data.

Please try the build from https://private.z3ntu.xyz/fairphone/TWRP_3.1.1-0-testbuild/
The one on twrp.me should be updated fairly soon.

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This works. Thank you very much!

(And I’m impressed by this fast response. :slight_smile: )

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Not sure if someone here can fix this, but the latest official twrp build twrp-3.1.1-1-fp2.img does have a bad gpg signature. This is pretty bad, as this could mean someone broke into the twrp servers. Could also just be a bad signature of course.

I opened an issue at github already:

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Ok, was fixed already :slight_smile: Thanks @z3ntu

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From March 2017:

Is the TWRP that came with my Fairphone Open installation capable of coping with encryption? It calls itself 3.0.2-0; I first installed Fairphone Open 18.03.1 (in April, via fastboot) and that has since updated itself to 18.04.1 (via the Updater app).

If no-one knows, is there some way of telling whether my TWRP installation would cope with encryption without actually encrypting my phone?

On the face of it, my version number is smaller than the number in @z3ntu’s post, but I’m not sure of the relationship between @z3ntu’s TWRP and the one shipped with Fairphone Open; maybe the relevant functionality has been backported or whatever.

If this TWRP can’t cope with encryption, is it likely that a future Fairphone Open update will include an encryption-capable TWRP? I’d rather not go off-piste with my own TWRP if I don’t have to.

Answer: I think the stock Fairphone Open TWRP can’t deal with encryption, as I suspected.

I’ve encrypted my Fairphone Open installation (temporarily removing the camera modules first, per another post in this forum), and now TWRP behaves like this:

  • Forgotten settings like timezone (which I think lived in (storage)/TWRP)
  • Displays “Data (0MB)” in the backup screen, and attempts to backup fail (I should have said that backup is my main aim of using TWRP)
  • Shows nothing if I “ls /data” in its terminal

Does anyone know if a newer, crypto-capable TWRP is likely to be included in Fairphone Open in future? Is there something I can usefully do to encourage this?

Fairphone would know, but it should be very likely.
If I remember correctly, Fairphone somewhen in the past updated the bundled TWRP from 2.8.something to this 3.0.2 now, with eyes on the (missing) encryption handling it is very unlikely they’ll leave it at that.

That being said, it is not much of a problem.
Installing the latest TWRP is very easy afterall, there are no incompatibilities, the only thing to mind is: After installing the latest version you have to reboot into TWRP right away (not into the OS) to make the new TWRP resident. Otherwise the old TWRP will get reinstalled by the OS.

Influencing Fairphone’s development process in this regard instead I think would take more time and effort with unknown short-term success :wink: .

It turns out someone already asked for an updated TWRP, and FP rejected the request with “The new version of TWRP requires an Android 7 tree to be built in, our tree is on Android 6.” (Which seems like a fair enough reason.)

So I guess we’re not likely to see an updated TWRP before Fairphone Open moves to Android 7 (which I’m assuming will happen eventually, given this blog post)?

In the meantime, I installed TWRP 3.2.1, and that could access the encrypted data. However:

I was careful to do this; however, I’ve never let TWRP write to the system partition (that question it asks you the first time you start it), and so the TWRP upgrade didn’t stick after I’d booted the main system (now that I go back to look at the message it gives, it does warn about this – “TWRP will be unable to prevent the stock ROM from replacing TWRP”).

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This reason is wrong. Yes, the TWRP people put new versions in branches called android-6, android-7.1, android-8, etc but this has nothing to do with which “version of Android” TWRP requires. It’s just which AOSP recovery version it’s based on (or was merged in).

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