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Root Boot time comparison

kanaida

kanaida

Android Expert
Hey guys, this new girl i'm seeing just happened to have an HTC Wildfire (metro), and It's space was pretty pathetic (150MB internal, geez one app and you get warnings). So anyways I rebooted it, and I was shocked how fast this thing boots. I'm talking less than 5 seconds, almost instant.

So here I am thinking to myself, either a) HTC is the shit and has great programmers, or b) LG is just that bad at it. I doubt hardware has anything to do with it as our LG Esteem has much better specs.

Anyways, the point here is that it's worth investigating seeing what their rom has or doesn't have that makes it this fast to start up. In theory, ours could start even faster. I'd be very interested in a gingerbread ASOP rom built from source, but only having the drivers from this phone compiled into it to see how that runs. I know ICS is coming along, but I figured this would be much easier and faster for the moment since I can tell it's gonna be a while. I have a funny feeling this would fix the low battery life as well.
 
Well u have yo think their Read Only Memory is very small too they so they have to squeeze in the tiniest OS. I understand what u mean but.it just really wont.work too well.
 
That's the point lol embedded devices are supposed to do that, my point is if they run gingerbread, they should have similar boot times (and probably other speed benefits), so obviously they tweaked something better. I'm gonna do some comparisons, something has to be more efficient. The whole point is to pack your rom into the smallest size possible because less reads = faster. Also more stuff is in cache memory which makes other things faster.
 
What you have to realise is the stock Esteem ROM is almost 1GB in size, between 600 - 700MB IIRC, compared to a 100 - 200MB ROM. You have to decide weather you want speed or function. You also have to look at the features the Esteem has over the Wildfire, like hdmi out, hd video recording etc, etc. All those things come into play with bigger n better phones compared to the lowend get ya by phones.

;)

And with AOSP or CM7, porting it still wont be a walk in the park tho should be alot easier that ICS/CM9 is being.

;)

PS. And not all phones are created equal, so no they all shouldn't boot or run as fast as another phone. ;)
 
I've been dabbling with compiling just plaing google code, I think if I get the hang of it I can make roms a little better, this git stuff is confusing as all shit lol... I did sync your CM9 Repo. Just getting used to the tools so far, it's much harder figuring this stuff out, than working with visual studio like I do every day. I do vb.net, not even C but I'm good at poking around and changing things :)

hey PG, when you made your kernel what did you do? dump the image, extract it, change files, then re-pack it? or do something with the source from LG's site? I've made my own linux kernels before (i'm running my own 3.2.1 that I made right now actually), wanted to give it a shot.
 
kanaida said:
I've been dabbling with compiling just plaing google code, I think if I get the hang of it I can make roms a little better, this git stuff is confusing as all shit lol... I did sync your CM9 Repo. Just getting used to the tools so far, it's much harder figuring this stuff out, than working with visual studio like I do every day. I do vb.net, not even C but I'm good at poking around and changing things :)

hey PG, when you made your kernel what did you do? dump the image, extract it, change files, then re-pack it? or do something with the source from LG's site? I've made my own linux kernels before (i'm running my own 3.2.1 that I made right now actually), wanted to give it a shot.
Click to expand...
Built it from LG src, edited of course. Then just unpack the boot.img swap out the zImage (kernel) and repack. Thats with the stock ROM and kernel zips, with CM* the kernel gets added to the device tree and anything needed from the ramdisk is pulled and added to the device tree in CM* along with all the other stuff that gets configured and used.

Yea with a linux distro we can get teh src to compile the kernel easily, with android it depends on the carrier and manufacturer as when we can get the src. Fortunately LG is one of the nicer ones when it comes to making the src available.
 
ICS was just released for my tablet and surprisingly it helped boot time drastically. PreICS (froyo, GB,HC) boot time seemed to be a couple minutes. Now with ICS it is about 20 seconds. This is something to look forward too.
 
Thanks PG. I'm gonna try to figure all that out, so I take it there's no user interface app like the one one linux where you can browse kernel components and enable/disable them independently? I mean I don't mind messing with files, but it sure makes things faster and less prone to typos :)

One thing I'm trying to understand is, if lets say I get the google vanilla kernel for gingerbread, I would think that I could pop in the modules required for the drivers into some source code folder, possibly editing some config files to load them, compile and have a clean kernel as android intended + hardware specific drivers. shouldn't be too hard using lsmod to figure out what they are.

Source -> Drivers -> ??? -> Profit! lol

I'll experiment with your method. I'd like to rip every part of the kernel out that is not used to make it nice and lean.


Almost forgot to ask, what version of ubuntu are you using that has all the necessary packages to build properly out of the box (in the repositories without having to scavange much)? I tried in mint 12 and i saw I had to go thru hoops, i'd rather just set up a text only VM install just for building.
 
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