Extracting proprietary blobs from LineageOS zip files

Introduction

Proprietary blobs can be extracted either from a device already running LineageOS or from a LineageOS installable zip. In this guide we will describe the steps required to extract proprietary files from installable zips.

Before beginning, it is required to know the difference between block-based OTAs and file-based OTAs. In a file-based OTA the content of the system partition is available inside a folder of the zip named system. In a block-based OTA the content of the system partition is stored inside of a file as binary data. If your zip has no system folder or an almost empty system folder, and a file named system.transfer.list in its root, then what you have is a block-based OTAs. Jump to Extracting proprietary blobs from block-based OTAs in this case. If you have the entire content of the system partition inside the system folder and no system.transfer.list, then what you have is a file-based OTA. See Extracting proprietary blobs from file-based OTAs.

Extracting proprietary blobs from block-based OTAs

Create a temporary directory and move there:

mkdir ~/android/system_dump/
cd ~/android/system_dump/

Extract system.transfer.list and system.new.dat from the installable LineageOS zip:

unzip path/to/lineage-*.zip system.transfer.list system.new.dat

where path/to/ is the path to the installable zip.

You now need to get a copy of sdat2img. This script can convert the content of block-based OTAs into dumps that can be mounted. sdat2img is available at the following git repository that you can clone with:

git clone https://github.com/xpirt/sdat2img

Once you have obtained sdat2img, use it to extract the system image:

python sdat2img/sdat2img.py system.transfer.list system.new.dat system.img

You should now have a file named system.img that you can mount as follows:

mkdir system/
sudo mount system.img system/

After you have mounted the image, move to the root directory of the sources of your device and run extract-files.sh as follows:

./extract-files.sh ~/android/system_dump/

This will tell extract-files.sh to get the files from the mounted system dump rather than from a connected device.

Once you’ve extracted all the proprietary files, unmount the system dump and delete the no longer needed files:

sudo umount ~/android/system_dump/system
rm -rf ~/android/system_dump/

Extracting proprietary blobs from file-based OTAs

Create a temporary directory to extract the content of the zip and move there:

mkdir ~/android/system_dump/
cd ~/android/system_dump/

Extract the system folder from the zip:

unzip path/to/lineage-*.zip system/*

where path/to/ is the path to the installable zip.

After you have extracted the system folder, move to the root directory of the sources of your device and run extract-files.sh as follows:

./extract-files.sh ~/android/system_dump/

This will tell extract-files.sh to get the files from the extracted system dump rather than from a connected device.

Once you’ve extracted all the proprietary files, you can delete the files that were extracted from the zip:

rm -rf ~/android/system_dump/