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Root Rooting today--wifi tether...ROMS?

I was running an old initial release version of froyo and was having trouble updating the maps app. OMJ (who seems to be a genius on this stuff) helped me out and recommeded the FRG22Deoxed that I linked to and a chevy normal voltage kernel just to get me up and running. It worked perfectly. I have since played around with different kernels and have found I cannot run the chevys ulv kernels and have an occasional reboot problem with the P3 900. I found the slayher kernels and they work out very well for me. They seem to be the fastest with the least amount of lag time when you set preferences in setcpu to "interactive".
The key for me to getting the best battery life was paying attention to the profiles in setcpu and the interactive setting for the slayher kernels.
The only other rom I tried was LFY 1.4. It did not seem any faster and I had a couple of bugs on my phone so I went back to the FRG22Deoxed that I linked to. I have had zero problems with the rom, the slayer uv kernels, and petes latest baseband. The phone runs like a dream so I really don't see a need to change it.
 
I would like to add that after reading SetCPU for Root Users , I was able to configure the "Conservative" scaling in the advanced tab to gain the best compromise between battery life and CPU speed for my needs. It helped a LOT. In Conservative scaling there are a couple more variables you can set, including CPU load threshold both for up scaling as well as down scaling, and also scaling increment size. The latter was a tremendous help in getting several more hours out of my battery while using the "look-around" tilt feature in Google Earth as my "real world" speed & power test.
Conservative scaling can actually be configured to mimic Power on Demand scaling, or even all out full bore, so don't be fooled into thinking that it's a preformance-kill just by it's name sake.

-I also believe that for the muab's needs as outlined in the OP, the sock 2.2 800 MHz kernel will probably be plenty fast enough.




Also, many people have been having difficulties with ROM Manager lately. It's huge. I think maybe it's gotten too big, I dunno. I don't know what the deal is with it, but ClockworkMod Recovery does seem to be getting more problematic with each release.
I LOVE ROM Manager. It offers so much, but one of the more overlooked features I've grown to appreciate lately is the ability to flash to an older release of ClockworkMod Recovery. I have flashed to 2.0.2.0 and am having no issues so far in installing updates, etc.
 
Psychokitty said:
I would like to add that after reading SetCPU for Root Users , I was able to configure the "Conservative" scaling in the advanced tab to gain the best compromise between battery life and CPU speed for my needs. It helped a LOT. In Conservative scaling there are a couple more variables you can set, including CPU load threshold both for up scaling as well as down scaling, and also scaling increment size. The latter was a tremendous help in getting several more hours out of my battery while using the "look-around" tilt feature in Google Earth as my "real world" speed & power test.
Conservative scaling can actually be configured to mimic Power on Demand scaling, or even all out full bore, so don't be fooled into thinking that it's a preformance-kill just by it's name sake.

-I also believe that for the muab's needs as outlined in the OP, the sock 2.2 800 MHz kernel will probably be plenty fast enough.
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Click to expand...

As I mentioned elsewhere, I am now running BB 0.4 and so far I am very, very pleased with it. I have not made it a full 24 hours (or even 12 hours actually) so the battery test is still up in the air. The speed of the stock kernel packaged with this ROM is entirely adequate. I have not noticed lag, hesitation or redraws. It is definitely smoother than stock Froyo was and Froyo was FINE for me on the speed issue.
Battery life appears to be better already, but again I will go a full 24 hours and make that determination.
I do not enjoy spending hours in the guts of a phone (or computer or router or anything else really) so I don't really get off on dinking around with every modification and upgrade. I want my phone to work and I want certain bells and whistles to work.
All of this *appears* to have been achieved with this ROM in one swoop.

I have SetCPU installed on the phone and once I get a firm understanding on its battery performance with stock BB I will probably try Pscychokitty's suggestion on fiddling with the conservative settings to see how much more life I can squeeze out of the battery. My goal is to use my phone fairly heavily and have the battery last a minimum of 12 hours. On days at home with minimal usage it should last a minimum of 24 hours.

Help and suggestions from everyone have been absolutely priceless. I appreciate everyone taking a moment out of their lives to give me tips.


Cheers
 
I am pretty new to the Root and Rom thing myself. I am running UD7 and really like it. Iam also using Chevy's 1100LV Kernel. So far today under normal use I'm down to 70% battery after 10 hours unplugged. I find much less of a need for Terminal Emulator with UD7 because it has all the commands already scripted and under settings. Just my .02
 
That is great input.

If I decide to try another ROM, UD and Chevy's 4.7 were both in my sights.

I am like BB 0.4 very well thus far and it might take something pretty compelling to get me to shift.
 
gndmepyon said:
I am pretty new to the Root and Rom thing myself. I am running UD7 and really like it. Iam also using Chevy's 1100LV Kernel. So far today under normal use I'm down to 70% battery after 10 hours unplugged. I find much less of a need for Terminal Emulator with UD7 because it has all the commands already scripted and under settings. Just my .02
Click to expand...

I'm now running, well, it's in my sig. But I started out with UD7 with Chevy's LV 1GH kernel and could squeeze 36 hours out of my battery with conservative use.
The extra 250MHz in the P3 kernel wasn't a performance increase proportional to how much it was sucking up my battery, and I was going to go back to the Chevy. But since I've read the instructions (D'oh!) for SetCPU, I'm at 70% charge after 11.5 hours so far. This'll be my first full day test run with my new SetCPU configuration.
 
Psychokitty said:
I'm now running, well, it's in my sig. But I started out with UD7 with Chevy's LV 1GH kernel and could squeeze 36 hours out of my battery with conservative use.
The extra 250MHz in the P3 kernel wasn't a performance increase proportional to how much it was sucking up my battery, and I was going to go back to the Chevy. But since I've read the instructions (D'oh!) for SetCPU, I'm at 70% charge after 11.5 hours so far. This'll be my first full day test run with my new SetCPU configuration.
Click to expand...

Wow. I would be thrilled about that sort of battery life.

I think something may be a little haywire with something in my phone right now. After I flashed BB yesterday, I charged the phone up fully, then pulled the phone off the charger about 2AM. This morning about I spent about 5 minutes trying to get wifi tether working, then checked my battery and it was 80%. I tried wifi tether again for another 10ish minutes then killed the tether and wifi. (I run no wifi, no BT, no GPS as my normal status). About 3PM I got the low battery warning at 15%.
So that is about 12 hours from full charge to low batt with extremely minimal usage and maybe 15-20 minutes (failed) attempt at wifi tethering.

I have not done any adjustments in SetCPU yet and I am charging the phone now to try another test with no wifi tethering attempts.
 
Well I can't seem to get anyone to add a yae or nae, but I think doing a battery pull after a kernel install does something to recalibrate the meter. Like I say, I'm not too sure. I say this because I've had to yank the battery after installing kernels just to get a first boot to happen (was looping). I've only installed maybe seven ROMs (maybe 9?) not counting going back & forth between my own update images, and about 5 or 6 clocking kernels. But that happened with two of them for me.

12 hours out of the box is good, considering you're doing a fair bit of screwing around with it. I know the tethering does suck juice. I turn down my clock via SetCPU when I use it.
I think with more putzing around with SetCPU, turning down screen brightness, keeping mail and news/weather apps polling frequencies down, etc, you can see what could have been a 36 hour charge (if you let it deplete...) at the end of a day when you realize you really haven't used your phone much.
 
Well, I'm still experimenting, but right now I'm running the Conservative scaling.
In the Advanced tab, I've set...

Sampling Rate - Default is 300000 milliseconds. This is the frequency that SetCPU polls the CPU load. I set mine to 250000, but I'm not sure what effect it's having, good, bad or indifferent.

Up Threshold - Default is 80%. This sets the load threshold the CPU reaches before SetCPU steps up the clock speed. I set mine to 85%.

Down Threshold - Default is 20% This sets the load threshold the CPU reaches before SetCPU steps down the clock speed. I set mine to 25%.

Ignore Nice Load - Default is 0 (No) I have to re-read Michael Huang's instructions about this. I've left it alone. It's either Yes or No (1 or 0).

Freq Step - Default is 5% This determines the size of the step, I believe. I'm uncertain of this, also, so I've left it alone for now. But my kernel has seven steps, so it can go a maximum of six from low to hi & vice versa. So I'm not sure if dividing 6 into 100 (16.66%) isn't what it's actually doing. As far as I understand it, it can't step up in partial steps of the kernel.

So here's the deal; I set SetCPU to boot into Conservative Scaling, and twice now, during reboots, be them FCs from messing around or just from playing with a nandroid, I check on SetCPU to find the damned thing has booted into On Demand Scaling, instead, which of course is set much more aggressively. So I'm not sure what's going on, and I haven't had a good run of 30+ hours to check any settings thoroughly for battery longevity.

I also am running P3's 125-1250 MHz kernel, and 125 may do well for battery life, but it's pretty much useless for anything else. I did have a profile to set the max frequency to 125 MHz when the screen was off, and my battery was about dead in four hours, and she was hot. Turns out it was FCing & rebooting constantly. Disabled that smart idea, though I'll probably enable it for 500MHz. See, that's kind of the PITA with this kernel I'm running, as much as I like it. -There is no 250 MHz step on this one, which my Droid could handle with that screen profile when I used Chevy's kernel.
P3 does have another high frequency kernel that does have 250MHz as the low, which I think I might look into.

As for profiles, I have the following...

CPU Temp > 70.0* C..........700 Max 125 Min.........Priority: 100
Battery < 15%...................500 Max 125 Min.........Priority: 90
Temp > 60.0* C.................500 Max 125 Min.........Priority: 80 (battery temp)
Charging/Full.....................700 Max 125 Min.........Priority: 60


The last one, I dunno; My Droid seems to get hot while charging. I watched the CPU speed for a bit, and for some reason it was high, so I curbed it a bit.

The priorities only come into play when two of the conditions occur at the same time. Keep that in mind, and that it's probably best to put your CPU and battery heat thresholds as the two highest priorities.

S'all I know... I'll post results if I can ever get a good solid run, but the fact is rebooting seems to suck the juice pretty good, and I've been playing around a bit too much to observe anything longer than about a 6 hour clip.

I'd be interested to know what other people are running for kernels and how they've configured SetCPU.

I should also mention that although I do keep my screen time out low and brightness down, I often have my GPS, WiFi & BT on, and still get good battery life.
 
Psychokitty said:
I'd be interested to know what other people are running for kernels and how they've configured SetCPU.
Click to expand...

I am having great luck with slayher 1.6 kernels. I have tried the 800, 1000, and 1100 all without a problem. Currently runnning the 1100
Settings:

Main Screen:
1100/400 Interactive (set on boot)

Profiles: (all set on Interactive)
Screen off 400/250
Charging full 400/250
Battery 30% 600/250
Battery 15% 400/250
Temp 50 400/250

I am getting great battery life, the phone stays cool (really cool when idle) and I find the "interactive" mode more resposive than ondemand.

From Slayher:

"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."
 
Very interesting.
I set my polling frequency down from 300000 ms to 250000 with the idea that it should be a tiny bit more responsive, but at the trade off of using more energy to poll more frequently.
But today, using my phone as I would normally for an average day; 2 short calls, three texts, read some email three times, and a quick spin for fun on Google Earth, my battery level says 70% after 12 hours, five minutes. -Of course it could be 60% at this second, as the battery increment only goes in 1/10 (so unfortunately...), but even at 60%, that's a calculated 20 hour charge minimum.

Tomorrow I will enter the Screen Off - 500 MHz Max profile to see if an appreciable increase is seen. If there is none, I will try installing P3Droid's 250 - 1250 MHz kernel so that I can use the same profile with 250 MHz.
 
Alright, well I never did do any benchmarking numbers. But I started messing around with other kernels, trying to find one that had the 250 MHz low but that also supported CPU temp metering. It turns out, for me, anyway, that P3Droid's kernels (the ones I was trying) don't have the steps as advertised. SetCPU uninstalled and reinstalled afterwards, the whole deal.
But while trying about five different kernels, and then going back to try out nearly all of Chevy's kernels, I found that even at 1 GHz, the Chevy kernels were decreasing my boot time dramatically and making my phone zippier.
I dunno. I'm back to being stumped after thinking I was getting a handle on any of this stuff, lol!
Currently running cooler and snappier at 1 GHz on a Chevy Ultra Low Volt kernel.
 
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