yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Nexus S General] al_madd:
Linux kernel 3.3 released with merged Android code and more

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/19/linux-kernel-3-3-merged-android-code/

So??We can get new version of kernel right??
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
Maybe this is one of the biggest reasons of the long waiting for the next ICS OTA update. They may want to itegrate the new kernel in the update...

Wait & See...
[Nexus S General] :
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say for sure, but having the Android code in the Linux kernel may be more help to app developers and things like the Android x86 project. I don't know what the impact for phone or tablets will be.

kernels ; battery ; ROM ; gov/sched

Now with summaries in the first posts. Convenient for XDA app users!
[Nexus S General] KrisMurdrum:
About time! ^_^

Not a question of If but how long until our devs will have one out.

I think you are right bedalus, those articles I read specifically mentioned cross-platform app support

Carved into the Void using my ICS powered Magic Rune Stone
[Nexus S General] :
UPDATE: linked to flodb113's excellent survival guide in the OP
[Nexus S General] dinos3:
Cm9 4.0 is out ;)
[Nexus S General] :
I've decided to start learning C++

This will leave me with very little free time on top of work and childcare duties, so I've decided to close this thread. The spreadsheet will remain open for anyone who wants to copy the format, or analyse the data.
[Nexus S General] glennkaonang:
Thanks for all your efforts for the community.

Does this also mean a hiatus for your other benchmark threads?

If so, perhaps someone could continue bedalus' work.

His phone is aging faster than ours after hundreds or even thousands of flashes.
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
Hi buddy,

Good luck in your C++ adventure but please don't close this thread. It is full of precious information and it should be better to let the people exchange what they think about kernel performence here. If one day you will have some spare time, you can do some small further benchmarks in case of substantial updates (moving to kernel 3.3 or OTA 4.0.4).

PS: Why C++? Java is better lol :)
[Nexus S General] af974:
Thread closed by OP request
[Nexus S General] simms22:
oooo... dirty. sounds fun ;)
[Nexus S General] synaesthetic:
Stability tests would be nice as well. While I love fast kernels the same as any other computer nerd, I'd rather my device not suffer sleeps of death. :)
[Nexus S General] baolongn:
Steve's kernel looks great! Would the overclock have something to do with it?
[Nexus S General] thegtfusion:
Yes it does :D running it right now with peter alfonso's ics rom. The kernel makes it as fast as light and as smooth as butter. Battery life rocksss for a oc'ed kernel!! Got 30 hours with screen on time :4 hours!! (I got that yesterday :p).
[Nexus S General] :
I wouldn't know how to test that. The only kernel that rebooted was Lucid by reddv1, which was purely down to voltages. In my experience, it's too much overclocking and not enough voltage that causes most complaints about stability.

Sent from my SNES
[Nexus S General] :
It certainly didn't hurt. Tomorrow morning I'll have a second morfic Kernel up at the intended 1096MHz, so it'll be easy to see what effect it can have.

Sent from my SNES
[Nexus S General] jvanlew:
Awesome job bedalus! This thread should be stickied. :)
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
Once again, thank you so much for this great work bedalus.

I think that this thread could be easily enriched by user experiences of each Kernel. I am thinking about a little survey attached with this thread including feedbacks for each general criteria like stability (smooth, reboots, FCs...), battery life (number of max battery hours without recharging), snappiness (lags...) etc. At the top in the survey we can easily read the averages of each Kernel.

Definitely, it may not be as accurate and scientific as the work done by bedalus but it can be useful for everyone here ;)

I don't know how to do such surveys on XDA but if some of the old masters here think that the idea is feasible and useful, please do it ;)

cheers.
[Nexus S General] :
I think that there can be something to the wisdom of crowds. However, I can't really think of a rigorous way to collect the data. The polls available here are one dimensional, and for your survey you would require two. Of there was a way to do it, it certainly would be interesting.

Sent from my SNES
[Nexus S General] noobiekins:
My read and write speeds are pretty high, writes as high as eugene's and higher reads than it apparently. Note it's underclocked so my cpu scores should be a little lower than normal.
[Nexus S General] Ibn Saeed:
First of all, thanks for the benchmark. It really helps.

Did you test it on only 1 ROM ? Any particular reason for selecting Slim ICS Rom to test on ?

Do you plan on testing them all on other ROMs as well ?
[Nexus S General] asphantix:
Would love to know which kernel has the best battery life. The comparison brought me to try Steve's Kernel which seems to be very smooth but seem to drain the battery more than matr1x did.
[Nexus S General] :
I may pick one kernel with good all round performance and bench all the ROMs but not sure yet. It would be more time consuming than this, and I'm not sure who would be interested. I'm fairly certain that most users know that the more features their ROM incorporates, the bigger hit their will be on performance. If i feel there if a need for it i may try.
[Nexus S General] Ibn Saeed:
Excellent Idea.

Just pick around 5 Roms, dont do more than that.
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
Totally agree. Personally, I prefer light weight ROMs remembering that we have a Nexus S here with only 512 MB of RAM. So, I totally appreciate your choice of Slim ICS to perform the Kernels Benchmark ;)

I need some free RAM for the apps and my devs... Maybe with a Galaxy Nexus, the choice criteria will be different :D

Talking about RAM, can the choice of kernels affect the available RAM in android?
[Nexus S General] thegtfusion:
According to the scores in red, steve garons kernels wins :D :D nice work man. Very useful thread just what I needed. :)
[Nexus S General] Shark_On_Land:
We only have 512 of ram?! :|

Great thread. Its amazing
[Nexus S General] steve.garon:
(sarcasm) Damn you bedalus!! (/sarcasm) I had all the benchmarks app uninstalled from my phone and now since you did those comparisons I've reinstalled the benchmark apps and I am obsessed with getting better results.

On top of that Linus release 3.0.17 kernel and pete a updated rom.

Can we not get one week off where there wouldn't be anything to tweak or any new stuff to flash?

My crackflashing/crackbuilding habbits are surfacing again.
[Nexus S General] morfic:
Interesting effort.

However, If some do not support 1000MHz or 1100MHz, why not double test those that do? then kernel comparisons will be more well rounded.

And the published numbers are the averages out of how many runs?
[Nexus S General] :
More simple, less to go wrong.

Yes, I think so. One of the devs might be able to help, but I'm reasonably sure that the kernel can manage how tasks are cached, whether in RAM or virtual RAM, and if there are fewer features in the kernel, this will save RAM I think.

Good times!

I'm going to retest yours at 1096MHz now, and reddv1 is sending me a build that boots at 1000MHz to retest.

Yesterday I felt that because I benched each kernel in an identical way that averages would be unnecessary, but Ezekeel PMed me and said that benchmarks can vary wildly from run to run. To be honest, I will be surprised if I were to re-run any of the tests to find 'wildly' different results, maybe a little different. I think the main reason for different results would be what ends up in the processor cache if you run tests consecutively, like people do with quadrant. Nevertheless, I will re-do one that I did yesterday. If it is much different, I suppose I will have to make the effort to average out the results!
[Nexus S General] :
Results are up.
[Nexus S General] LGIQEXPO:
If you are the one who put this together, then I have many thanks to you! Wonderful job!
[Nexus S General] simms22:
id say theres quite a difference. oh, and that 666 was meant to be :)
[Nexus S General] :
Haha, yeah, thought that was pretty good!

Also, just rearranged the table to put morfic's results on the right, and did a second pass on that kernel to see if the results would be much different. On the whole, actually I'm fairly pleased to see a good level of consistency on most tests.
[Nexus S General] simms22:
most of the benchmarks are actually pretty predictable per cpu speed per device once you learn each benchmark and its variance. its when things differ and deviate from what you expect that draws attention. thats why benchmarks can be very useful to developers. they will know right away if they messed something up or did something very right. to the average joe, these benchmarks are useless, but to the dev, they can be invaluable tools.
[Nexus S General] :
Second post edited to reflect changes in the table layout.

Can people feed back to me if this is a useful feature?
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
yeah our Nexus S has only 512 MB of RAM and ICS seems to be greedy in memory... I am thinking if the Kernels can make further optimization to RAM management (like the supercharger script for example) :rolleyes:

---------- Post added at 12:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:46 PM ----------

is there a way to benchmark this aspect in kernels bedalus?
[Nexus S General] :
To see what impact the kernel has on RAM, I could check my free RAM after performing all the benchmarks. I will try to remember to do this the next time I bench a kernel. In fact, I now plan to.
[Nexus S General] :
I've updated the spreadsheet again to make it easier to read. I've boiled down the results to CPU / RAM / IO / GRAPHICS.

The raw data is still available just below. Please see my second post about how I achieved this. Can I get some feedback about whether this is useful?
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
The score are more readable now but I think that the clock difference between the kernels is still a little bit confusing. I don't know if mathematically my idea is correct or no but what if we devide the CPU score by 1 when the frequency is 1000MHz and by 1.1 if it is 1100 and so on? its is called Normalization if I am not wrong :)

If the idea is correct, the only remaining problem is maybe the impact of the CPU clock difference on the other criteria (RAM, Graphics and I/O)..

Anyway, at it's current state, this benchmark is really very good ;)
[Nexus S General] :
I really wanted to test the kernels in their default state, as intended by the developer. So, I think what I'll do is add the clock and bus speeds above the scores, then people will be more informed.
[Nexus S General] oo03sjw:
great work, looks impressive.

I am going to leave now look up what this actually means, :-) now I know how little I know.

Thanks
[Nexus S General] :
Chart now updated (again, twice in one day!) with Peter Alfonso's stock kernel. Will create an extra column for Franco should he return!

Oh, and added SQL database benchmark for this one, and free RAM reading post-bench. I will be adding these in every time I bench a new or updated kernel.
[Nexus S General] simms22:
Oh, i almost forgot.. theres the trinity teuv ics kernel, underclocked at 880mhz, undervolted, with a bus speed of 220mhz. also bare boned. http://goo.gl/QAuKi
[Nexus S General] :
I think I can get this done tonight, so long as my nexus s can handle the uv.
[Nexus S General] simms22:
fingers crossed..

i tried thanking your post, but i guess that i reached my xda limit of thanks per day :p
[Nexus S General] :
Ha, i tried thanking you for yours! Aren't we self-congratulatory? ;)

Sent from my SNES
[Nexus S General] :
Okay, looks like 24hours have passed and you got your thanks sims22!

The TEUV worked on my phone happily, and the results are up. Do you know if is there a ramdisk beefing up the I/O scores? I thought they'd been reclassified as a dangerous entity?
[Nexus S General] simms22:
and you got yours.. :p

ramdisk beefing up i/o in teuv kernel.. i dont believe so. but ill ask morfic anyways.
[Nexus S General] SA-07:
Good job with this! It can be very helpful for ppl wanting to see how the kernels stack up...
[Nexus S General] :
Great, could you also ask him to drop in on the thread and post if he thinks it is a useful idea for him and his work? I'm trying to get this thread reclassified as R&D. Thanks!
[Nexus S General] :
Thanks very much mathkid95!
[Nexus S General] mobile_pc:
Your great research inspires the kernel devs to further efforts

Thanks :)
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
I think that this is the best and the most significant comment that have been said on this work ;)

cheers.
[Nexus S General] eugene373:
It's nice to see somebody put raw facts behind something & not just bloated scores from Quadrant..
[Nexus S General] qtwrk:
oops

where is that "free memory after test" only "K" and "L" has number and other kernels don't have it?
[Nexus S General] keb00:
Very usefull for me!;):D

Plz keep doing your good work!:rolleyes:
[Nexus S General] simms22:
morfic now does in ramdisk what he used to do in his init.d file 98tweak, ext4 script and such. but i think morfic can explain it better to you. "dangerous entity".. no its not.
[Nexus S General] morfic:
Peter is absolutely right, there is more variation than you expect between runs, based on what else happens while you run it.
[Nexus S General] morfic:
Take a 1000MHz kernel running a 200MHz bus and take a 1440MHz kernel with a 240MHz bus, you would not do the 1000MHz kernel any service.
[Nexus S General] morfic:
That's the comment i was looking for, figured I'll ask what you are referring to.
[Nexus S General] Cybergr:
Things are getting more clearer now..thanks for taking your time testing and posting such a useful comparison of different ICS kernels...Helps everyone who is really intresting and sometimes confused...devs or not...but specially the lazy one!
[Nexus S General] veagles:
Very useful!

Can you add the stock kernel as well?
[Nexus S General] morfic:
Oh ****, we have no reference, thanks for correcting our oversight.
[Nexus S General] simms22:
true. without a reference, the results are almost meaningless.
[Nexus S General] Fum0n:
So useful. Made me want to try steve garons kernel and it rocks. Saves me from doing my own trial and error. Thanks!
[Nexus S General] :
Can I refer you to this post:

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=21366507&postcount=74

It was tchaari's idea (if I remember rightly) to include some indication of how much impact each kernel has on free RAM, so I'm including this information only on updated or new kernels. I'm not retesting the ones I've done already because it takes half an hour. New benchmarks will be available for at least one kernel today! Including free RAM post-bench!
[Nexus S General] :
terryhau's is totally stock with minor additions, Peter Alfonso's is optimised stock, not sure what that means, perhaps removed useless stuff? I'll happily test a completely stock kernel if someone can link me to one? I'd also like to test cyanogenmod's if I can get a link?

To say there is no baseline, that's only true if you don't accept the stockish kernels that are on the list as representative of stock.

In any case, a baseline isn't necessary. I'm working around a mean. The table allows for comparison of kernels against each other, not against a baseline. Check my second post. I want to see some mathematics if people are going to attack the credibility of the statistics.
[Nexus S General] :
It's now a long passed hazy memory from something I was reading in one of the kernel threads back before ICS was released. Something about 'looping' maybe, and how it can be disastrous for data integrity if you get a reboot??? Sorry, maths is my thing, OS and code, just a hobby.
[Nexus S General] veagles:
You can flash official OTA ICS 4.0.3 update and benchmark it
[Nexus S General] :
No, unfortunately this would be unfair. I'm using a particular host ROM (Slim ICS) and need to maintain identical testing conditions. I do a fresh ROM install for every kernel.
[Nexus S General] veagles:
I guess it would have been better to use OTA Stock 4.0.3 as the base ROM
[Nexus S General] veagles:
Grab the official kernel source code, build it, and use fastboot to get it on the phone :)
[Nexus S General] tchaari:
There is a problem with speedy4 benchmark? can you please put back speedy3 and consider speedy4 as another separate Kernel until resolving this problem?
[Nexus S General] :
Sorry about that. It's up now.

No problem with the kernel. I just thought I had time to do it, then ended up having to go out!

For future reference, old raw scores are visible below the current raw scores.
[Nexus S General] :
Ha, perhaps if I build the kernel, the mods will move the thread back into development! ;) I'll look into it. Have built stock ROM before, but have rebuilt PC since then.
[Nexus S General] aLNG:
if u oc eugene speed4 to 1100..it is comparable (maybe even better) with other kernels with 1100
[Nexus S General] :
Second post updated. It explains how I have achieved accuracy to within 2% of the genuine average. Check out sheet 2, added to the spreadsheet.
[Nexus S General] morfic:
Please reread what you wrote there.

The kernels exist not to win a pissing contest, but to do what we felt the stock kernel didn't do or not good enough.

This info would be most interesting for those wanting to replace a stock kernel without having to flash a dozen. Or replacing the custom kernel they are not fully happy with.

So the reference would have.been the cherry on top of your great work.

But no, chose to defend what wasn't attacked, pfft.

Sent from my RW Sensation.
[Nexus S General] :
Fair enough, I'll build a stock kernel and bench it.

I've listed all the stated features of the kernels in post three so users or ROM devs can quickly see whether the features they want are included.

I'd still like your opinion on how I've eliminated unacceptably variable data from Quadrant, AnTuTu, Vellamo and Smartbench.

Sorry simms22, I guess my almost meaningless work wasn't being attacked.

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=17617281&postcount=3994
[Nexus S General] simms22:
D

i hope you dont think that i think your work is meaningless, because i do not. your work is a goldmine of information. what i meant to say came out wrong. what i meant was that its hard to see where all these custom kernels have made improvements without that stock kernel scores as a base to work from. please forgive me, your work itself is very respectable and i hope that this thread gets moved to development, especially after you compile a stock kernel. oh, about that link, thanks for giving me a laugh, i needed it :D
[Nexus S General] :
Ok then, good times! :)

UPDATE: Steve Garon's 14th Jan 2012 High Hz kernel added!
[Nexus S General] :
Busy morning, added Steve Garon's newest earlier, and now morfic's T132, check the chart to see the results.
[Nexus S General] cspader:
your work will definitely help alot of ppl.. thanks! btw can u add test result for stock 4.0.3? or will that be redundant since it'll be close to simplekernel? thx again!
[Nexus S General] Blizk:
Great info. This should help.
[Nexus S General] :
I'm working on it. I'm just doing a repo sync and it's taking hours... When done I'll build a vanilla kernel and bench it.
[Nexus S General] Greenthy:
This still isn't stickied ?! ...
[Nexus S General] :
Disaster! Repo sync failed. I've reached my download limit. I'll see if i can use gnome-schedule to try to get it done over night when downloading is free. In the meantime, can someone link me to a stock kernel?

Sent from my SNES
[Nexus S General] (THE REAL) Neo:
Here it is,the Ics OTA stock kernel.

Thanks for your incredible work!;)
[Nexus S General] :
Thanks again for that.

So, hopefully add that one tonight, then a little reorganisation of the table. Have an idea about making the percentages easier to interpret.

UPDATE:

Okay, chart updated. Just added the stock kernel results, thanks again to (THE REAL) Neo for helping me out and saving me a lot of time.

Also, edited the order of the kernels, so that higher clocked kernels appear to the right, with the exception of morfic's TEUV in the interest of keeping his results grouped.

Finally, each row of results in the overall scores section are now relative to the global mean, but adjusted to display a percentage relative to the stock result.
[Nexus S General] :
I'd really appreciate some feedback on the red highlighting. I've highlighted at 5% better than stock, because results can vary by 2%. If the kernel benched as high as it could, and your favourite custom kernel benched as low as it could, they would be 4% closer together in the results. So, my reasoning is that at a difference of 5% you can guarantee that the custom kernel is performing better.

HOWEVER: Who cares if it definitely performs at least 1% better? I'd like people's opinions on whether I should do the red highlighting at 10%. At 10% the difference in performance is going to be noticeable. Or maybe even 14% to account for worst-case-scenario variation. Perhaps 12% to split the difference? Feedback please!
[Nexus S General] :
Thanks for this. I'm sticking with Matr1x because of lukzactive, though

Beamed from my Nexus S using xda premium
[Nexus S General] :
No probs buddy! :) Actually, I now plan to keep track of what default I/O scheduler each kernel uses, and which others are included as optional. The same for CPU governors. This will be added to the information in post#3: http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=21322946&postcount=3

NEW RESULTS ADDED: Steve.garon's 14th Jan 2012 kernel (best colour) added!
[Nexus S General] :
Noticed an error in the 'Overall Results' section I/O formula. Corrected now! Details: had forgotten to remove one of the benchmarks that produced variable results.

Already re-run ezekeel's GlaDOS, Netarchy's Yerba Mate, and Mathkid95s Mart1x kernels. I have three more benchmarks to re-run today: terryhau's simple kernel, reddv1's lucid, and morfic's T11 'bare boned'

Once I have these, I will also have SQL results for every kernel, which I will integrate into the I/O overall result. This will bring the overall accuracy back into the 98% margin.

UPDATE: All done, SQL performed for every kernel. Spreadsheet updated to reflect the additional benchmark. Also, free RAM readings available for every kernel now. Also added to post#3, accurate info for what schedulers and governors are available for every kernel.
[Nexus S General] :
Brand New: Feature Comparison Table

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AntDDKv-lS6IdHlOVUZ1WkJtMmpXdjl6TURCVFR0cWc

Just need to add the last few kernels in, but too tired right now! 'night y'all.
[Nexus S General] MrBigWaffles:
Ok, if im reading your table right, if free memory is the most important feature for me, I should use Steve.Garon's kernel?
[Nexus S General] :
Looks like it, but I have no variability data for the free mem test, so unlike the benchmarks, it's difficult to guarantee. I'd say... probably.
[Nexus S General] flodb113:
I have been keeping an eye on this thread since it was first posted and I'm happy to see this stick. Great idea, clears things up for everybody! (before flashing speedy-4 after GLaDOS, I took a quick peek at your threat;))
[Nexus S General] deetailed:
Digging the feature table! It's nice to have this with the sheer number of kernels for our device.

I have a suggestion for both tables though, can you freeze the header row so we can still see the kernel name while scrolling?
[Nexus S General] :
That's a great idea. I have no idea if it's available on Google Docs spreadsheets, but I'll definitely add that if I can! EDIT: Looks like it is no longer a feature of Google Docs, unless I'm mistaken?

Stickied! flodb113 has been on it right from the get-go. Cheers!
[Nexus S General] deetailed:
The menu is under View > Freeze rows. :)