I wanted to check if Rescue Party, a much touted feature of Oreo is active on my device ( since it is not mandated in Android Compatibility Definition Document as the linked source says)

The first step is to override USB connection suppression, since

All rescue events are suppressed when the device has an active USB data connection because that’s a strong signal that someone is debugging the device

To do that run

adb shell setprop persist.sys.enable_rescue 1

My device returns

setprop: failed to set property 'persist.sys.enable_rescue' to '1'

I conclude from this that Mi A1 doesn’t support (adding to the long list of things it doesn’t support but is expected to, being stock Android) but wanted to recheck with Linux wise folks- is my conclusion correct? ( some explanation would help)

Aside, this XDA thread No, Android Oreo’s Rescue Party is not the bootloop fix you were looking for gives useful details on Rescue Party