What's the difference between product partition and vendor partition? After flashing a GSI image, product partition is missing but vendor partition is there. I am confused about where should my application be installed.
In recent releases, more partitions were created in Android: system, vendor, product, odm, and system_ext. It's hard to understand it from the official document, wish someone can help summarize it here.
The product partition is an extension of the system partition. OEMs install stock Android system image in the /system partition. The customisation they do to the Android framework is stored in the /product partition. This allows a single system image across all OEMs' devices and unique customisations in the product partition. There's a weak ABI between the system and product partition which links product to the Android framework. GSI works without product partition.
Similarly, vendor image can be generic for multiple devices with the same SoC or the same family of SoC. vendor partition contains the Board Support Package (BSPs) of the SoC. Vendor customisations are included in the /odm partition and odm is linked with vendor by a weak ABI. The vendor partition still works without odm.
See all the components of ODM.
product is an extension of the Android framework and odm is an extension of vendor modules.
