Thursday, January 13, 2011

What is the SpeedMod kernel?

The SpeedMod kernel is a fast, stable, and efficient (good battery life) alternative Android kernel for the Samsung Galaxy S, S2 and Note, compatible with stock Samsung roms.

It makes our Samsung Galaxy faster, the way it's supposed to be! Plus, it has lots of cool new features.
The SpeedMod Gingerbread kernel is available for:

- Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000)
- Samsung Galaxy S2 (GT-I9100)
- Samsung Galaxy Note (GT-N7000)

The SpeedMod Froyo kernel (no longer maintained) is available for the following models:

- International Galaxy S (GT-I9000) and Bell Mobility Vibrant (GT-I9000M)
- AT&T Captivate (SGH-I897)

SpeedMod Gingerbread features:

Root and CWM:
- Installs root (su)
- CWM recovery

Screen and misc tweaks:
- MDNIE screen sharpness tuning (improves text readability)
- MDNIE color tuning (reduces over-saturation of color)
- Lower brightness at low-light levels (S2 only)
- init.d, TUN, CIFS, IPV6 Privacy support

Performance:
- CPU governor tweaks: increase responsiveness
- IO tweaks
- Read ahead tweaks
- Updated to jhash3
- Compiled with optimizations using newer Linaro GCC 4.5 toolchain
- Switched to SLAB instead of SLUB (S2 only)
- ext4 filesystem conversion / lagfix (SGS only)

Excellent battery life and smoothness by disabling unnecessary logging:
- Disabled Android Debug Logger / logcat
- Disabled Kernel debug (S2 only)
- Disabled Samsung debug (S2 only)
- Disabled various tracing and debugging options

SpeedMod Froyo (deprecated) features:

Basic features

- Based on Samsung released kernel source code
339MB RAM

Improved sound quality

- Voice calls: audio works with standard stereo headphones and phone mic
- Voice calls: louder earpiece volume and tweaked mic gain to reduced distortion
- Recordings: corrected mic gain to remove audio distortion from video recordings
- Slight boost to rear speaker volume level
- Improvements to FM radio sound quality
- Headphone output boost with support for Voodoo Sound application

Improved display quality

- Improved sharpness: enabled AMOLED mode in MDNIE processing
- Superb text clarity: Removed over-sharpening of the screen
- Better colors
- Optional warm and cold color correction for screens which are too brownish / blueish

Universal Lagfix

- Enhanced version of sztupy's Universal Lagfix
- Safest ext4 mount options
- Supports ext2 / ext3 / ext4 / ext4nj / jfs lagfixes (only ext4 is recommended)
- Supports conversion of /system partition

Brightness Tweaks

- Minimum brightness lowered by 30% for comfortable low-light use
- Auto-Brightness adjusted to keep the screen dimmer longer in low light
- Auto-Brightness adjusted to make the screen brighter earlier in bright light

- Auto-Brightness sensor polling interval increased from 0.5s to 1.2s
  (Saves battery and makes brightness levels more stable)
- Auto-Brightness "darkness mode" can be disabled / enabled from Recovery menu

Speed and Efficiency Optimizations

- Disabled kernel debug logging
- Disabled Android debug logger (can be re-enabled via Tweaks)
- Replaced kernel jhash2 with jhash3
- Battery level polling frequency reduced from 5s to 60s

Linux OS Tweaks

- Tweaks for CFQ IO scheduler
- Tweaks for VM parameters
- Tweaks for increased Battery Life

Updated source code patches

Updated ext4 code in kernel
- Properly working Tiny RCU patch for better speed and efficiency
- Updated lowmemorykiler from Android git

Miscellaneous features

- Includes neldar's BackLightNotification 2.3
- Adjusted kernel HZ value to increase smoothness
  (500 or 250 HZ for integer divisibility by 1000ms)
- Compiled using latest Codesourcery 2010.09
- Better GPS performance


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