About 4EXT SmartFlash
This is a new feature that allows recovery to flash your boot partition just like as if you were s-off.
Credits and thanks to Team Win and Dees_Troy for their commitment to the community, for their amazing idea with the Dumlock and for extra contacting me only to offer that I may use it.
You guys really rock!
SmartFlash is a different approach to Team Win's HTC Dumlock
Just use your recovery like you would if your device were s-off
No preparations needed, other than telling the recovery that your device is actually s-on
This is done when you install recovery and answer the question that you are s-on with "yes"
You can also change that setting later on via RecoveryControl -> Recovery settings, or by editing 4ext.prop manually
Recovery will autodetect any changes done to "boot" and only attempt to flash your boot partition if it was really changed
This even reduces unnecessary writes to "boot" when for example a new rom uses the same kernel as your previous one
Before updating your boot partition, recovery will always backup your boot partition to your sdcard just for the case something goes wrong
Only the 4 latest boot images are stored, older ones will be removed automatically to prevent taking up too much space.
In case you want to enable or disable that feature temporarily, you can use a switch inside the tools menu in recovery
How it works:
Recovery will detect any requested changes for your boot partition
When you reboot out of recovery, it will prepare updating your boot partition on next rom start
This means that your boot partition will be updated when you see the HTC Splash screen, followed by 1 reboot
So basically the only visible difference to when you are s-off is one additional reboot, which takes only a few seconds.
Recovery is NOT flashed to boot and boot is also only flashed once/update
Recovery will only attempt to flash your boot partition if it was really changed