Flashing

Flashing is the process of copying the entire OS to a device’s internal storage.

It’s generally carried out over a USB connection using tools like adb and fastboot although it can be done “over the air” (OTA)

The internal storage is split into a number of partitions each (or many) of which contains one of the following:

• bootloader
• kernel
• firmware
• system filesytem
• data filesystem
• recovery filesystem
• other filesystems
• backups of any of the above

There are both development tools such as the recovery system, fastboot and adb as well as on-device user-level applications such as the system updater which are capable of writing to these partitions.

For more details about flashing for developers please see the Hardware Adaptation Development Kit.