Wednesday, October 3, 2012

A little more phone work...

I think by now I have my phone where I want it. After tinkering with just about everything, I've found the balance in performance and battery life I like.

First off, sticking with the Wheatley governor. I tested OnDemand and Interactive along with Wheatley. OnDemand generated the best battery life, but suffered jerky frame rates occasionally. Interactive arguably provided the most fluid performance, but battery life suffered. The phone didn't sleep nearly as much as it should. I would guess I lost about 20% battery life over the other governors. In the end, I found Wheatley, the governor that was specially designed for this kernel, provided the best of both worlds. It's really more of a jack of all trades. It doesn't excel in either, but overall is the best for day to day use.

The I/O scheduler was initially a wash, but further work with noop proved that it was the inferior of the two. Noop showed more lag, reduced battery life, and overall degrading performance. Sio is now my preferred scheduler, which is also the stock setting.

GPU remains constant at 384 MHz. The small boost in performance over the stock setting of 307 MHz without battery loss is obvious. The 512 MHz caused tons of visual glitches while scrolling through menus and such. This setting remains the same as before.

FSync off is a setting I found benefited the system quite a bit. At the cost of potential data loss on a crash, I noticed less lag and overall smoothness in animations. With the setting off it also boosts battery slightly.

Core and MPU overclock are staying at stock. Core OC caused reboots frequently and greatly reduced stability. MPU overclock is a bit of a wash. You can shift the setting either way to the maximum of 1.6 or 1.712 GHz, but overall the performance didn't pan out that much better. For benchmarking, it's a good idea, but daily use it just reduces stability and battery life.

Voltages are still keyed with the smart reflex system. I've reduced them as low as the system says is safe and have noticed a greatly enhanced battery life.

All other settings remained stock. Overall, I'm pleased with the development of the GLADoS kernel. The developer has gone out of his way to write not only an excellent control program, but also set the kernel up so tweaking is almost completely unnecessary.