Droid Hype

A user by the name of slayher over at the CyanogenMod forums has released his kernel compiles to the public. Included is the very neat interactive governor.

The CPUfreq governor “interactive” is designed for low latency,
interactive workloads. This governor sets the CPU speed depending on
usage, similar to “ondemand” and “conservative” governors. However
there is no polling, or ‘sample_rate’ required to scale the CPU up.

Sampling CPU load every X ms can lead to under powering the CPU
for X ms, leading to dropped framerate, stuttering UI etc..

Scaling the CPU up is done when coming out of idle, and like “ondemand”
scaling up will always go to MAX, then step down based off of cpu load.

There is only one tuneable value for this governor:

min_sample_time: The ammount of time the CPU must spend (in uS)
at the current frequency before scaling DOWN. This is done to
more accurately determine the cpu workload and the best speed for that
workload. The default is 50ms.

Running the 1200 low voltage version, my Quadrant score shot up to over 1700+. This is about 270 points more compared to running ChevyNo1′s 1250 low voltage. Wow.

If you have Launcher Pro, or any other home replacement running, sometimes you’ll notice it will restart itself (redraw icons) when you try to go back to your homescreen. This can be caused by the app running out of memory or something crashing in the background causing it to restart. Either way, it’s ok if it happens once in a while but if it’s every time you hit your home key, then it’s a problem.

I’ve tried just about every setting in Launcher Pro on my Droid. From setting the memory usage to high and checking and unchecking various settings to see if anything changes. Here’s what I’ve noticed that made an improvement.

1. If you have more than one home launcher, remove the ones you do not use. I had ADW and the default Launcher2 loaded as well as Launcher Pro which I was using. I removed all of them except Launcher Pro.
2. Set Launcher Pro option to keep it in memory and change memory usage to medium or high.
3. I had SetCPU‘s widget on the main homescreen showing me my CPU speed. Upon removing it, the screens appeared quicker coming out of an app.
4. If you are running CyanogenMod, change the option for VM heap to 32M.

With these changes, I’ve noticed about 60-70% less redraws. Your mileage will vary of course depending on how your Droid is set up.

The CyanogenMod team has just released the second stable CM6 release for the Droid. To get this installed, open up Rom Manager (Market app) and install via the CyanogenMod rom section.

I just loaded this up on the Droid, here are a few tips to get you going.

• Clear your download cache in Rom Manager before downloading RC1. I didn’t my first time flashing the rom and it got stuck at the Motorola logo. It looked like the original download wasn’t playing nice.
• Some users are reporting the version of su (superuser) in this rom not working too well. I had some problems with SetCPU gaining root access and remembering my settings. I ended up flashing down to version 2.1. You can download su v2.1 below. Just flash it via the update.zip method thru your recovery of choice.
• No need to wipe data or cache if you were running RC1.
• MAKE A NANDROID BACKUP!

Everything is smooth so far running with ChevyNo1′s ULV 1.2Ghz kernel and CM6 RC2. This release is still based off of the FRF84B build. The power widget has a 3G data switch now. There’s also a built in lock screen music control option – no more needing to unlock your phone to play or skip your music tracks.

I’ll report back with some battery results after a few more days of use. So far its looking pretty good.

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After having ran Bugless Beast 0.4 for nearly 2 weeks on and off, I decided to try CyanogenMod’s latest Froyo (from source) rom, 6.0.0 RC1.

My steps on swapping roms:

1. Titanium Backup all apps
2. Nandroid backup current rom
3. Download CyanogenMod via Rom Manager app

There’s a pre-requisite that you have to be rooted to perform the above. I’ll run through the root process in another update later on. Contrary to what everyone else suggests, I did not wipe data. I simply loaded CM over my previous BB rom. The process took roughly 15 minutes before I was back on my lock screen.

First impression is that its snappy and everything settled in quickly. CM comes with its own tweaking/settings section. My favorite by far is the ability to hide the clock in the status bar. I run Beautiful Widgets, so having two clocks looked weird.

Two tweaks I did was disabling dithering and changing VM size to 32MB. This seems to increase performance just so slightly without sacrificing the look and feel of the rom. I loaded up my current kernel of choice, ChevyNo1′s ultra low voltage 1.25Ghz 7 slot. Currently I’m running ondemand via SetCPU at 250/800Mhz.

I’m currently on hour 12 of running CM, I’ll need to update once I put this rom thru it’s paces over the week. So far, everything looks pretty good in CM land.

Update: so far so good, battery life with heavy 3G data and voice yeilded about 13 hours before needing a charge. One other neat setting is the ability to unlock the phone with just the menu key – VERY convenient.

Update: jdlfg has some updated kernels for CM6RC1 specifically. They’re at version 32.2.2, grab them here via his twitter feed. Supposedly these are battery life saving in nature.