[LG Optimus Black] knzo:
A few explanations.

This version was in cooperation with Aprold and without him it wouldn't have been possible.

I know now for sure that Nova will be in good hands.

1. kernel

First this version has been built with Mjolnir toolchain. This toolchain is a joint project between IntersectRaven and Redstar based on Linaro 4.6 but with a couple optimizations. Nova is the 3rd kernel to use Mjolnir (1st is iR's, 2nd is Cayniarb's and well, 4th will be Franco's since I sent him the toolchain). The main advantage of this toolchain is that it's built with hard float support which essentially means that it tries to output more instructions that will run on the hardware FPU rather than being emulated in software which in turn makes things go faster.

Secondly, more crap has been removed. Stripping the kernel from unnecessary stuff equals to less CPU cycles being consumed which improves performance and battery.

Then, SLAB allocator has changed to SLUB which minimizes cache line usage instead of managing queues of cached objects. SLUB has also been tweaked to get its performance improved (reduce unnecessary overhead). It seems to be a surprisingly good alternative to SLQB.

Libsqlite.so has been also removed in exchange for a kernel runtime that allows enabling/disabling fsync(), fdatasync(), sync_file_range(). I will explain this in a sec.

Smartass2, Lazy & InteractiveX governors were removed and a special Ondemand and Interactive have been added. Lionheart has also been tweaked and some values tuned.

The rest is mostly about memory, arm and rcu stability fixes there and there.

2. package

In order to avoid problems and conflicts, these important changes were made: 1. it wipes cache and dalvik-cache (the first boot will be long); 2. the kernel is injected using CM's untouched ramdisk, this maximizes compatibility for next CM nightlies; 3. the DVFS disabling script is now working and the v08's scaling issues as well as performance decay should be gone.

The auto-root restore will automatically fix your root if you lose it for some reason (hopefully).

3. nova settings

Just like Nova ROM, we've included a nova settings interface. Just go to terminal and type 'nova' (without ''). Options:

- Disable/enable some modules (CIFS, TUN, Logcat, NFS)

- Disable/enable DVFS (pro: DVFS seems to fix some radio issues - con: decay on performance and scaling issues)

- Disable/enable ext4 journalism (pro: disabled journalism improves I/O performance so the opening/closing of applications is faster affecting thus the overall snappy impression - con: decreases data integrity checks so it may cause data loss on some rare occasions - never happened to me but...)

- Disable/enable fsync() (this is like a patched libsqlite.so but more extensive. pro: improves I/O performance so the opening/closing of applications is faster affecting thus the overall snappy impression - con: decreases data integrity checks so it may cause data loss on some rare occasions - never happened to me but...)

- Disable/enable quadrant loopback hack (rawr script basically. pro: comparison only with another devices that have this toggled (Galaxy S2, HTC HD2, ...) - con: fake I/O boost) - still not implemented in nova v09 package