It's not what you likely think it is.
"Dirty flashing" refers to installing an OS update, in this case an Android phone update, without wiping data first (which has attendant hassle of restoring apps and their data).
My aging Android phone is one of those officially supported by Cyanogenmod. Since I acquired it, I've been running CM11, which tracks the official "KitKat" (Google version 4.4). In the meantime, CM12 (Lollipop) and CM13 (Marshmallow) have been released. I had been resisting upgrading, because the device install instructions recommend wiping data and a brief attempt to install CM13 led to a continual crash loop.
Since then I read an official Cyanogenmod blog post inviting people to dirty flash. I decided to try again, but this time with CM12, which has an officially stable release for my phone ("snapshot"), while CM13 is still in test/development/experimental releases ("nightlies").
I followed the instructions for downloading the CM12 bundle, Google Apps, and updated the recovery manager I had installed already. I made a fresh backup of the running OS, copied that to another machine for safekeeping (also I keep a backup of the stock (factory) OS KitKat image, in case I have to run through any activation steps with my phone provider), put my phone in airplane mode, disabled XPrivacy (with its fine-grained application permission settings), and booted into recovery. Then I wiped Dalvik (the Java runtime cache) and Cache (the rest of the operating system cache) and flashed CM12 and Google Apps. And rebooted. And waited. Upwards of an hour later, my phone had finished booting and updating application caches.
And everything works, though the settings have moved around a bit and I'm still getting it set up as I like it. Still, my apps, my data, my home screen setup, all there without trouble.
I'm going to try CM's Privacy Guard feature for a while instead of XPrivacy, because it's less intrusive. XPrivacy was constantly asking for permissions and it became tiresome.
Next up, CM13 after a snapshot release is posted for my phone.
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