Understanding the partitions

The following are the common Android partitions that exists as of android 13:

• boot
• init_boot (Introduced in Android 13)
• system
• odm
• odm_dlkm
• recovery
• cache
• misc
• userdata
• metadata
• vendor
• vendor_dlkm
• radio
• tos

Boot

• Prior to Android 10, the boot image used to contain the ramdisk which used to be mounted as the rootfs.
• The boot image only contains the GKI kernel now.
• All device specific parts of the kernel are now separated out of the kernel and moved to vendor_boot.img.
• The image header version is 3 for such arrangement. (Only supported from Android 11).

Super

• Dynamic partitions are a userspace partitioning system for Android. Using this partitioning system, you can create, resize, or destroy partitions during over-the-air (OTA) updates.
• With dynamic partitions, vendors no longer have to worry about the individual sizes of partitions such as system, vendor, and product. Instead, the device allocates a super partition, and sub-partitions can be sized dynamically within it.
• Individual partition images no longer have to leave empty space for future OTAs. Instead, the remaining free space in super is available for all dynamic partitions.