muab

Finally going to make the root leap on my D1 today.

I have some pretty specific and limited needs and I have been reading EVERYTHING on rooting for the last two weeks and still don't have a clear idea on a few tidbits.

Here is what I hope to achieve by rooting:

1. Wireless wifi tether

2. Improved battery life

3. Eliminate my wifi problems that came with FRG01B OTA

4. Be AT LEAST as smooth and fast as my current setup

5. Be AT LEAST as reliable/bug-free as my current stock Froyo

I am entirely satisfied with the look and feel of my device so I don't NEED to have any themes etc...

I know through research that some ROM's provide easy wifi tethering and some do not. I need one that does since that is my prime requirement.

I am also concerned about the new OTA this week screwing up my root access before or after I root the device.

In reading a bazillion threads everyone keeps saying that each phone is unique in what ROMS/Kernels the phone will "like" which I find quite baffling honestly...but I guess you all know what you are talking about.

I would not even change ROM or kernel if I can achieve my 5 requirements, but from what I see, I do need to change my ROM at the least.

Any recommendations on which ROM's to try? Please note any ROM that does not allow easy wifi tethering is a waste of my time.

I already have ROM Manager, SetCPU and Titanium Backup all queued up on APPBrain for me and I will be pulling the trigger on this today.

I have read all the instructions on rooting the "hard way" and the "easy way" and my time is very valuable so I will use easyroot or the other one...Universal Androot.

Thank you all for any help or suggestions.

gnath9

sounds like you know what your doing !!!

I am not positive but I think my wifi tether is still working fine since I loaded up Lithium Mod with P3's 1200 kernel. It can be had all in one shot from rom manager premium and you get a theme of your choice tossed in !!!

I think your gonna be fine and achieve all your goals If you run into any problems I'm sure all these fine folks will be here to help you out if needed

burntorangefan

Your needs were similar to mine, although the more I learn about my rooted phone the more they seem to change...

Given what you've written above and my personal experience with Liquid, I'd say flashing LFY 1.5 and then either rolling with the stock 800 kernel or flashing the slayher 1000 kernel would be a great setup for you. WiFi tether is included and for me has worked without a hitch. IMO, this is the smoothest, fastest setup with the best battery life I've experienced. Other ROMs such as Cyanogenmod offer more customizable options, but it definitely sounded like you don't care too much about that. For sheer speed and efficiency, I'd say Liquid is hands down the winner and my comparisons with it are based on BB, CM and Chevy 4.6 (I haven't tried 4.7 because I'm settled in with LFY now)...Hope that helps. As an aside, the Black n Bold theme is really slick and gives the phone a really sophisticated look, IMO. Hope that helps.

Last edited by burntorangefan; August 27th, 2010 at 01:00 PM. Reason: Also, Liquid's ROM will prevent the OTA update from coming to your phone.

burntorangefan

I think any kernel above 800 or 1000 will cause you to see decreased battery life...you just hit a threshold where battery gets very diminishing returns due to the awesome speed...At 1100 or greater, my phone really started to lose battery quickly. Granted, the phone ran lights out fast, but I needed the combo of superfast and good battery life, so settled in on 1000.

Finally, if you haven't already, I'd queue up either Astro if you don't have it or Root Explorer...you're going to need a good file manager (root expl is better but is a paid app) and you're probably going to run a few scripts and you'll need Terminal Emulator to do that...

muab

Well that is very kind of you to say. I would say that I know what my problems are and I have a rough idea of the map needed to solve them. Beyond that I am a bit out to sea I am afraid.

I did not see RM premium in the market so I presume that is a donation upgrade...?

gnath9

yes ... and you must install the free version first.

and you should be a little afraid lol ... Take your time ... do your homework ... and follow the directions to the letter.

Jcarmicha

gnath knows it best :-) I actually took the dive about a week in a half prior through the EasyRoot method and absolutely love it. As long as you have done your research everything should go through without a problem.

I installed Cyanogen due to it being the first Rom I actually knew of as well as being very user friendly.

gnath has told me a lot of great things about Lithium so that'll be my next step.

Good luck with the process!

muab

Yes, I really did not intend to OC to any great extent. My phone seems pretty fast stock. I would rather keep the same speed and get much better battery life.

I have Androzip for file managing. I had EStrong but I like the look of Androzip better. Astro always seemed odd to me.

I will have to look into terminal emulator. I hadn't heard that one yet.

glitch32

Agreed!

BTW, Lithium Mod is great!, it's very quick and I've had pretty good battery life. It's not as good as stock, but that's because it's OC'd, so I expect it.

__________________
Currently running:
CyanogenMod 6
Chevy's ULV 1GHz kernel

gnath9

wich kernel did you choose ?

burntorangefan

Pretty much all of the ROMs (except maybe Cyanogen?) OC the stock 550 mHz. It seems to me having tried several of them that 800 is the "standard" OC that each ROM starts with...for example, LFY has a standard kernel for 800 and I think I remember BB and Lithium being the same. As I mentioned earlier, I get really good speed and battery life with the LFY and slayher 1000 kernel...using SetCPU to govern...

Last thing, Terminal Emulator enables you to run different scripts to remove bloatware, enable certain functions that are available, but not standard like removing all ads from apps and things like that.

muab

I think I heard that with Froyo the stock CPU is sped up somewhat, so 800 mhz may not be far beyond stock Froyo.

It is odd to me that more people don't discuss Sapphire when it is apparently quite highly rated. In some respects it seemed to be more polished than others.

I have been busy today so rooting may not take place until tomorrow now.

Cheer and thanks for the tips thus far...

glitch32

Ya I'm using the stock kernel with setCPU to control it. I will at some point try new one. Mine is running at 800Mhz.

muab

What ROM are you using?

It seems like LFY or Sapphire or Lithium might all work. I REALLY don't want a bunch of bugs. I detest having to fix my phone all day.

Really just need the wifi tether and battery life an I can live with everything else stock I think.

Thanks

glitch32

I'm using lithium mod. Its been very reliable and I haven't had any issues with it. I'm using the cyan themed one.

muab

okay I actually rooted and ran SetCPU and autodetect.
SetCPU showed 600 max 250 min.

Is that normal? It seems low from what I have heard.


Thanks

muab

But I believe you said earlier that Lithium brought you worse battery life than stock?
I was interested to see that some ROMS definitely improve battery life.

I want that quite a lot.

Any other suggestions on that front?

Thanks a million!

Cheers

Dave17

I'm running Bugless Beast V0.4 at 800 Mhz out of the box with no issues whatsoever. I have found this ROM to be incredibly stable. (Thanks again to Pete and all that have contributed to this terrific ROM.) This ROM also has quite a bit done to it to increase battery life.

Not long ago, I was where you are now. Take your time, make incremental changes, and perform regular nandroid backups and you should be just fine. I have yet to come across a problem that couldn't be fixed by flashing a stable backup.

bluegrizzlies1

not to steal this thread but does verizon know if you are wifi tethering on a rooted droid?

glitch32

No, Lithium Mod has been great with it's stock kenrel. One that I tried, sapphire, was really bad on my battery. That could have just been the kernel that came with it though. As I understand it, you can get better battery life from changing the kernels too. I'm still just trying different ROMs so I haven't tried other kernels yet.
As far as improving battery life on the phone, once you start overclocking, the battery life goes down, but I've set up profiles on setCPU that keep it underclocked while the screen is off, and it will also underclock it when the battery reaches 50%. This seems to help out quite a bit.

muab

As I understand it, they do not know at all. But I have heard it theorized that if you are cranking tons of bandwidth through your tether that you might get on their radar and they could try to force you to pay additional fees.
I haven't actually heard that anyone has experienced it but it wouldn't surprise me if it did happen from time to time.

muab

After my research late into the night I was actually leaning toward this ROM and was about to try it out when I decided that I should probably wait until I was more awake.



Thanks for the input.

twistedlim

FRG22 DEOXED and one of Chevy's medium. P3, or Slayhers lv kernels. I have tried other roms but they have had a bug or two on my phone. The FRG22 has been perfect and I have gotten the best speed and battery life from the Slayher LV kernels.
Peter Alfonso

Froyo Kernels by slayher - CyanogenMod Forum

If you like the roms and/or kernels be sure to donate if you can to show your appreciation.

muab

Have you tried UD 7 or Chevy's newest ROM?

Thank you very much for the input.


Right now I am fighting with Clockwork Recovery. It is not staying flashed and it keeps reverting back to the regular Android recovery. Pissing me off.

Dave17

Are you using ROM Manager? I haven't had this problem, but I've read that flashing SPRecovery and then back to Clockwork can solve these kinds of problems. Good luck!

twistedlim

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.

Psychokitty

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.

__________________
Droid: UD Extreme 7.0 driving a Chevy ULV 125-1000
Xoom: Rooted, Overclocked, SD enabled, Themed,ready for da biznich...

Last edited by Psychokitty; August 29th, 2010 at 08:21 AM.

muab

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

gndmepyon

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

muab

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.

Psychokitty

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.

Last edited by Psychokitty; August 29th, 2010 at 06:08 PM.

muab

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.

Psychokitty

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.

gndmepyon

PK can you please post your SetCPU settings and profiles?

Psychokitty

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.

Last edited by Psychokitty; August 30th, 2010 at 07:06 PM.

twistedlim

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."

Psychokitty

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.

Psychokitty

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.