[Galaxy S Plus I9001 Android Development] skywalker01:
Basically yes, but please remember that it is still alpha which means in this case that I've only implemented A FEW Thunderbolt tweaks yet. And only those which I found useful and I even modified some of these values to my own likings.

And these settings can be spoiled up by scripts on /system that run later and I don't mean just init.d.

1. you can alter that easily with cpumaster or setcpu for example.

2. with some technical skill you can also do that by an init.d script which won't need a service to run; Thunderbolt's screenstate_scaling script is ideal for that purpose and this is also compatible to SkyHigh

3. there is no good reason to worry about 1.8 GHz, see below why

Very good example to proof that this doesn't matter:

1. an endless loop alone wouldn't cause the governor to scale up the frequency, only if you really make some severe calculations within like streaming compressed media or even compress audio/video for several hours.

2. but this won't hurt much since the battery will be drained in about 4-5 hours ;)

3. the most crucial battery drainer is the display which turns off automatically eventually

Conclusion: no problem in practical use

This won't happen because of these reasons:

1. if it gets too hot it will shutdown or at least crash and therefore stop; no long-term damage, just reboot

2. you might shorten the cpu life-time by overclocking it by about 50% or more permanently, that means to more than 2,1 GHz. On the other hand the system will also become very unstable and crash often. So the CPU indirectly warns you when it really gets into an uncomfortable situation. These two reasons actually where responsible for letting me restrict the max frequency to 1,8 MHz, I could easily set it to 2,5 or whatever (but most devices won't boot anyway then).

3. there were some AMD CPUs in the past that hadn't an automatic overheat shutdown mechanism and really could BURN down. That was if they were operated without a heat sink or with a damaged CPU cooler (or none of that at all). But did you ever hear of damaged CPUs in the last 5 years or so ? I didn't and I do this on a professional basis. In other words: the CPU is the most least part to fail/break in your whole system, even if it is overclocked reasonably ;)

Even these circumstances are by far not severe enough for a substantial cpu damage. And remember: most of the heat in this situation originated from the battery because it gets rather hot while charging, not primarily from the cpu !

And some other facts: even if you set the max. value to 1,8 GHz the CPU will run at slower speed most of the time. The CPU will usually go to 1,8 GHz only about 10% of the time, maybe 20% for gaming/media streaming and similar hardware demanding tasks. With rare use and only testing stuff like in my case right now it is even under 2% at 1,8 GHz.

The cpu governor takes care of this automatic frequency scaling and due to my experiences smartassV2 is best for clocking down fast but also clocking up when needed but still being quite performant. Therefore it is default in SkyHigh.

And my phone is extremely underclocked (= clocked down to the lowest frequency) for more than 96% of the time. You can check these values with cpumaster (in ms only AFAIR), but there are tools that also show the actual cpu clock periods in percent.

And one last fact: SkyHigh is undervolted. This doesn't mean less power consumption only it also means higher protection for you hardware. Why ? Well, if the CPU is really at the edge and becomes unstable it will crash/shutdown much sooner than with usual voltage and therefore protects itself faster from permanent damage. Overclocking an actively cooled CPU (like in desktop pcs) works the other way round: you overvolt the CPU to overclock it even higher, the CPU will fail later than with lower (or normal) voltages. And you also cool it better but that's impossible with smartphones unless you always want to carry it in cool pads or so ;)

Conclusion: I had a lot of thoughts about that kernel and it wasn't done for performance peaks or in a hurry. I could make it much faster like the cranium kernels but that's unserious business IMHO. I wouldn't publish something like this or if I wouldn't use it myself. And I do care about my hardware. And those of anybody else as well.