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5:04 AM · Sep 12, 2020Twitter Web App

Sep 11, 2020

Based on results of the beta testing, we're going to ship this release without our Android 11 kernel work. There are some backwards incompatible changes in drivers along with the Pixel 4 side channel mitigation issues, so we weren't able to ship this. twitter.com/DanielMicay/st

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Our suspicion is that the backport of f2fs made changes to the on-disk format that are not backwards compatible with the previous version. It's seemingly only an issue on a subset of users on the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL. This does not impact people that aren't beta testing.

We always test the future upgrade path before pushing out a release to the beta channel. However, in this case the upgrade path is being broken by reverting a large set of changes that proved to be too problematic for us to ship rather than waiting for Android 11 as a whole.

Not really sure what else we can do beyond pushing out this release and accepting that some of the beta testers on the Pixel 3a and 3a XL are going to need to do a factory reset in order to upgrade to this next beta release, which doesn't have any of these problems anymore.

These issues demonstrate why the beta testing is so important. Testing betas is an important kind of contribution to the project, but if you're doing it, it's important to follow along with our news, make regular backups (do that now!) and upgrade when you can deal with issues.

I think some people using the beta channel without thinking much about they're doing will be upset with these problems, but there's not much we can do about it. Need to get out the next beta release with the resolution for these issues and then work on getting it out to stable.