Root [MetroPCS] Why not adjust the emmc real estate?

[ccaapton]

Hi, guys.

The common complain about the F6 is that the internal storage is far smaller than reasonable. In fact many other 4G-emmc phones have much larger storage than f6.

I inspected the partition table of my f6, and found the /cache partition is larger than 800Mb, and pretty much empty. So I used adb+parted to:
-4. Installed aparted, and copy parted binary into /system/xbin
-3. backup everything
-2. go to airplane mode
-1. umount -l /data
0. kill zygote and any other java-application or others using /data partition.
1. delete cache partition using parted
2. delete data partition
3. recreate data partition with larger size but the same partition id. Only leave 250M.
3.5 rename the partition as 'userdata'
4. make_ext4fs on /data
5. recreate cache and make_ext4fs, rename 'cache'
6. reboot and recovery data
Now I have a 1.8G data partition which is more than enough for my usage.

Is there any caveat for shrink cache partition? Is LG set such a large cache for some legitimate reason or they just wanted to make this phone less attractive?

NOTE: This is not intended as a tutorial, I just want to throw it there for discussion. If you want to do the same, follow the steps in discretion, and prepare to solve your own problems. Strong linux skills would be very helpful.

 

[ccaapton]

I think it should be possible to wrap the steps as a script in recovery mode, or even a zip update file.

Unfortunately I can not write such a script because: a) I use parted as an interactively command tool, although parted seems to be scriptable. b) It is already been done on my phone, so I missed the chance of testing such a script.

 

[cborsky]

I haven't taken a look at the internal EMMC partitions, however I am curious as to whether splitting the cache partition to make a SWAP partition would improve performance or not for our device.