In our lkft-Android testing lab, we run CTS/VTS/LTS on 5 devices, with 6 Android userspace, and 15 Android Common Kernel versions resulting in total of 75 combinations on a daily basis. So far we have run 1.51B tests since May'24 and 4.90B since we started testing.
Over this period we have realized that the wear and tear of the internal storage, flash memory (eMMC or UFS), is a concern for the development boards (DUTs) in our Android testing lab. Not only it directly impacts the device's longevity and performance, all the more so because these devices are expensive and often hard to come by due to limited production/supply from the board Vendor.
In this session we will explore effective strategies for mitigating the impact of flash memory degradation, to extend the lab-life of AOSP DUTs. The speaker will share their experience and findings of booting AOSP off the external storage medias like USB and mmc-sdcard, so as to have the internal storage of the device being used as minimally as possible. And how they fit/used U-Boot in this experiment and why they think moving their AOSP (Android Open Source Project) builds from using Vendor bootloader to U-Boot will help in the long run anyway.