Question - Can some explain SRE and ROM meanings?

[KMan94]

Doing a lot of reading and lurking but have yet to see what SRE really means. Also I see a lot of ROM terminology... JH3 JF7 and the like. I'm assuming those are different versions but they don't really seem to make sense. Also, the relationship between the ROM and the kernal as I see differences there. And there are versions of firmware. Just looking for the relationships and meanings.

Might seem like a dumb question but I don't want to assume things.

 

[DT]

Howdy!

No dumb questions, only dumb answers (see below ):

SRE is a custom ROM. There are several custom ROMs circulating, all with various tweaks, bundled tools, etc. They have a name that's just something the developer chose, a few use an acronym, some use something fun/funny (like the "Unhelpful" series ).

Generally when the word ROM is used, we're talking about the OS (Operating System) part of the internal memory of the phone, including all it's various components: code, libraries, configuration files, drivers, etc.

One [major] part of the OS is the kernel and it can be compiled with different tweaks.

So when you're talking about a ROM "package", it can have a mix of different versions of the drivers, the kernel, fixes/patches and whatnot.

As far as the versioning convention (i.e., JH), I have no idea, but most them tend to be just some internal variation of: Major.Minor.Revision. So J = Major build (probably 2.1 core), the letter is the Minor code and the end number is just small incremental build numbers.

 

[topshelf95]

Think of it like this. You bought a computer 5 years ago and it was running say, Windows XP. Well developers have played with it and changed things with it over time, now we currently have the new, Windows 7. Most of windows 7 will still look familiar to you, because its based on the same structure, and you will still know how to use it, but there are new things you can do that you couldn't with windows XP. At the same time, there may be things you can't do with windows 7 that you could with XP, but thats usually because those things are obsolete or were generally useless to begin with and have been cut out on purpose.

If you change ROM's on your phone, you're basically doing the equivilent of changing operating systems that will let you do more things, easier. It also may inprove the overall performance of your phone.