[Galaxy Note II Original Android Development] AndreiLux:
Perseus alpha25 (23/10):

Raised and fixed USB, MISC charging rate to 900mA.

Enabled OTG car dock, smart dock and music dock charging. Alternatively this can be triggered if you short pins 4 and 5 of the USB connector with a 40.2kΩ, 64.9kΩ or 619kΩ resistor.

MTP fixed on OSX devices.

Fixed ROM power savings feature, this was originally broken because of the addition of overclocking, and the same interface that Samsung uses for limiting CPU speed in power savings mode also limits the max frequency to factory defaults. This is now fixed and powersavings mode will throttle to 1000MHz.

Fixed mis-configuration of the default audio settings to improve sound quality, sorry about that.

Ripped out the old GPU scaling mechanisms and scaling logic and replaced it by something new.

The old mechanism was getting overly complicated and was a remnant of the Galaxy S2 where we merely had 2 frequency steps originally; this was fine then, but isn't anymore today. The threshold fuçkery was confusing to a lot of people and people generally misconfigured their settings with inane values.

The new scaling logic follows a more CPU governor-like approach: Scaling up logic is basically the same as before: the GPU will scale up to the next frequency step when the load reaches a certain threshold. Up-scaling takes place step by step. The up-scaling threshold is now global and a single value applies for all frequency steps.

Scaling down in the new logic resembles more like the ondemand method; The scaling down takes place when the load goes under a certain threshold. This threshold is dictated by the up-threshold minus a down-differential. By default they are 90 and 10. Triggering this condition we scale down into a dynamic frequency target capable of accommodating and dictated by the load level. In plain words, we can scale from max frequency immediately down to the lowest one. This will improve power consumption.

Ripped out the old GPU control interfaces and rewrote it with something new to accommodate the new logic. Your old scripts won't work anymore.

We now have 10 frequency steps to the user's disposition; defaults are: 54 108 160 266 350 440 533 640 733 800.

NOTE 2 USERS HAVE 533 AS MAX FREQ.

The new system interface targets can be found in /sys/devices/system/gpu/ .

- freq_table outputs a list of the current frequency table. You can use this interface for configuring the frequencies themselves in two ways:

Pair-wise target setting: echo 533 500 > /sys/devices/system/gpu/freq_table will change the 533 step frequency to 500.

Whole-table echo: echo 54 108 160 266 350 440 500 640 733 800 > /sys/devices/system/gpu/freq_table

In the above example you end up with the same end-result over the stock settings.

Valid clock frequencies are as follows: 54, 108, 160, 200, 266, 275, 300, 350, 400, 440, 500, 533, 600, 640, 666, 700, 733, 750, 800.

- volt_table outputs the voltages to the corresponding frequencies.

Pair-wise target setting: echo 533 1025 > /sys/devices/system/gpu/volt_table will change's 533MHz's voltage to 1025mV.

Whole-table echo in the same format as freq_table. Valid voltages are 600mV => x <= 1200mV.

- thresholds sets the two global threshold settings. echo 90 10 > /sys/devices/system/gpu/thresholds . Remember that the first is the up-threshold and the second is the down-differential. The down differential may not be higher than (99 - up value).

- min_freq and max_freq set the limits of the current DVFS policy. By default we're scaling from 160MHz to 440MHz (Same as stock).

echo 533 > /sys/devices/system/gpu/max_freq will enable the top limit to 533MHz and basically overclock the device.

echo 108 > /sys/devices/system/gpu/min_freq in the same way sets the lower limit.

25.3:

- current_freq shows the current frequency. This is if somebody likes to make a monitoring app or something.

- time_in_state shows the time spent in µS on each frequency step. Echo 0 to it (by default disabled) to disable it, 1 to enable monitoring, and any other numerical value to reset the timekeeping back to 0.

Perseus alpha24 (09/10):

Galaxy Note 2 source and kernel merge. Various platform fixes included from patching up from update5.

Fixed Mali GPU interface bugs relating to staycount, and lowered undervolt-soft limit down to 600mV.

Feature recap for new Note 2 users:

- Overclocking up to 1.8GHz and undervolting support through SetCPU. Note 2 users have a better quality CPU than Galaxy S3 users, so mind the default high voltages on those frequencies.

- GPU overclocking and undervolting support.

- A great amount of changes to improve battery life.

- Features which are in strikethrough in the changelog below do not work/are not ported on the Note 2, yet.

24.3 => Sharpness fix for the display included. Courtesy of hardcore.

24.4 => Removed Touch Boost in exchange for the Flexrate mechanisms. See below in changelog for more information.

Ported LCDFreq to the Note 2. See below in changelog for more information. The flickering is sadly still there on the Note 2.

Fixed undervolting below 850mV, previous undervolting below that value would be disregarded and 850mV would be applied in reality, even if it showed up the entered value.

Improved boot time by about 22 seconds: Fixed a major bug in the sensor hub firmware update logic, in the stock kernel and currently published sources the sensorhub firmware is being flashed over the current one on every boot, regardless if the payload firmware is the same as the current one. The update is about 130kB but it is done over the incredibly slow i2c bus, so this slowed down boot considerably. The reason was mis-labeling of the kernel firwmare version in the driver and failure to check if firmware was actually newer.

Perseus alpha23 (27/09):

Changed some auxiliary CPU clock dividers for frequencies 1600,1704,1800 MHz. These frequencies should use less power now and also should be more easily reached with more stability or lower voltage depending on your device.

Fixed CPUPower driver (Back from alpha20); this will now skew the reported processing capacity of CPU0 in the lower frequencies up until 500MHz to be 8 times greater than CPU1-3, what it does now is that the scheduler will even more migrate tasks onto CPU0 to avoid idle wakeups on the remaining CPUs, resulting in increased power efficiency. For high load > 500MHz, the driver reverts back to the default power configuraitons.

Reset the regulator configurations to their physical minima; you can now undervolt to 600mV on the GPU. Sorry I missed this before.

New feature: Dynamic Screen Frequency Scaling.

This decreases the display controller frequency in tandem with the CPU speed. Usually when you have low activity on the screen; i.e. low re-draw rates, then you mostly also have logically low CPU load. I wrote a scaling mechanic to switch between high display frequency (60Hz), and low display frequency (40Hz) in accordance to CPU scaling. This is tied in in the CPUFreq governor, in this case PegasusQ. We have three new governor configurables found in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/pegasusq/ (Or alternatively just use SetCPU):

lcdfreq_enable: Enables or disables the mechanic, disabled by default.

lcdfreq_kick_in_down_delay: The amount of samples to wait on below the threshold frequency before entering low display frequency mode. Default value is 5 for now, a.k.a. in most cases 250ms unless accelerated flexrate is active on low load (fingers touching the screen), then depending on situation it might get as low as 62.5ms.

lcdfreq_kick_in_freq: The frequency threshold below which the low display frequency kick-in will be active. Default is 500MHz, and should probably stay as such, setting it higher will cause lags as we'd be using 40Hz in an interactive situation.

For the curious: I made a rudimentary time_in_state state accounting sysfs in /sys/devices/platform/samsung-pd.2/s3cfb.0/graphics/fb0/lcdfreq/time_in_state for testing purposes. Currently it shows wrong time values for 60Hz as the driver gets initialized before the high resolution timer, and I'll fix that later, but the 40Hz time statistics are correct.

Notice: There will be now conflicts between this and user-space controlled TwDVFS service/app. The service would limit screen frequency to 40Hz while using the camera app, this will be now overridden. I also thought the service would do more but I could not find it scaling for anything else than the camera, so it's pretty much useless in my mind, and you could theoretically remove it.

Feedback 23.3: This feature causes flickering on bright colours and low brightness. Enable it at your own will.

Changed the functionality to boost to 60Hz on any touch interaction, regardless of CPU speed.

Please provide feedback on fluidity and battery life.

Perseus alpha22 (22/09):

Update to update5 source code. Only compatible with Samsung Jellybean ROMs.

Stacks with my previous memory changes: total memory: 857mB for now.

Implemented timer slack controller.

Backported the scheduler NoHz load computation fixes, this should dramatically improve PegasusQ's hot-plugging decision making.

Further reduced Mali sampling rate down to 50ms and changes the default thresholds to more aggressive power savings and clear-cut scaling. Removed 10ms regulator switching latency. I measured a 10% battery improvement in GLBenchmark 2.1 Egypt Battery - 50% Brightness 60 FPS.

config.gz support.

Alpha21 is the same as above but without update5 and for ICS. This is the last kernel for ICS, I'll not longer support it.

Perseus alpha20 (9/09):

Gökhan Moral's port of Voodoo Sound implemented. Currently no configuration interface is available, so if you wish to play with the settings, refer to the sysfs interfaces in /sys/class/misc/scoobydoo_sound/ . If you wish to change the device name, you must do echo 0 > /sys/class/misc/scoobydoo_sound_control/enable , followed by an echo output to the same file with the target device driver name. You can use this to change the device path to /sys/class/misc/voodoo_sound/ and sub-sequentially make a certain configuration application work. Please do not ask me for support on the latter. You can disable the sound modifications completely by the same method, by of course not re-enabling it afterwards.

Changed the Wifi packet filter to block out all but mDNS multi-cast packets.

Increased mmc timeout for bad quality SD cards.

Perseus alpha19 (1/09):

Updated Samsung source base up to update4, includes changes to the Wifi driver and various other small fixes

Added ARM topology support for the scheduler to be able to use sched_mc levels. This should increase cpu idle power consumption by decreasing idle wake-ups. For the moment disabled by default, and cpu_power doesn't seem to correctly work.

Swap support.

mDNIe sharpening improvement, courtesy of hardcore.

Decreased Mali utilization timeout to 100ms down from 1s which improves reaction time on instant GPU loads (Lock screen is best example).

New valid GPU frequencies : 54, 108, 160, 200, 266, 275, 300, 333, 350, 400, 440, 500, 533, 600, 640, 666, 700 Mhz

Increased user-space memory by 48mB to have a total of 825mB useable RAM; this comes from reduced DMA memory spaces on the part of:

- The Mulfi Function Codec a.k.a. the hardware decoding and encoding unit memory space from 50176kB to 28672kB

- The camera interface imaging subsystem from 12080kB to 10240kB

- The front-camera firmware block-space from 15360kB to 14336kB

- The ION heap size for the Video4Linux driver from 71680kB to 48128kB

In the case of the ION/V4L and MFC heap sizes I determined it by setting a benchmark for all the HD sample videos listed here to not have any detrimental effect before and after the changes. Below 41mB is the size for which the Planet Earth birds scene at 1080p high profile 4.1 40mbps video starts to lag. Keep in mind that there is no way this would be considered normal quality as this is basically un-recoded Blu-Ray quality and most videos are vastly under this bit-rate.

I note that I also haven't found any detriment in use of the cameras including the modded 30mbps camera quality.

Disabled the Kies daemon, I see no point in it and it uses up memory uselessly. Obviously Kies won't work any-more, if you want you can start the service yourselves manually.

Perseus alpha18 (11/07):

Updated Samsung source base up to update3, includes various fixes to fuelgauge battery reporting on full charge, MHL code, video media drivers, Wifi driver updates, gyroscope, MAX77686 battery charger changes, increased max display brightness, a buttload of LCD panel changes, and changes to the pixel refresh rate driver (This thing is controlled by the TwDVFSapp by the way and decreases screen power consumption at runtime).

ro.secure=1 again now but with an insecure adbd as root included.

LFB ramdisk.

Compiled with Linaro 4.6.2 and some higher level optimizations.

Keep in mind that running the new kernel on older ROMs can cause some funny behaviour, so update your ROM if so.

Perseus alpha17 (9/07):

Rewrote flexrate request code for pegasusq: I apologize for releasing the previous version in the state that it was, shame on me.

Now upon receiving a flexrate request and active ones, the governor delays hot-plugging sampling logic so that accelerated sampling is being taken into account and hot-plug sampling is normalized for the standard sampling rate. All sub-samples are being averaged into a normal sized sample at the end of the normalized period. This no longer interferes with the runqueue read-outs as they were being reset too fast and generally accelerated hot-plugging in a bad manner.

Changed touchscreen flexrate requests to 12500µS sampling rates over 4 periods to synchronize with the default pegasusq sampling rate.

I consider this chapter to be done and a success as far implementing flexrates as a viable and working alternative to touch-boost to increase responsiveness without having the bad battery-life side-effects of the touch booster.

Performance governor is now core-aware, previously as no other hot-plugging logic was available, the governor would start with whatever number of online cores were available at that time and stay like that. This made Performance useless for it's designed purpose, that being bringing maximum performance. It now brings up all available cores online upon start and turns all additional cores back offline on governor stop. It is now by far the best and consistent governor for benchmarking.

Removed unused cpu_freq_up, cpu_freq_down, and several other flexrate related governor parameters in Pegasusq as they were either not used, or senseless.

Default Pegasusq parameters changed:

- Sampling-down factor reduced to 1 from 2, this caused reduced sampling speed upon reaching maximum frequency. It now scales (possibly down) faster.

- Frequency steps reduced from 40% to 21% of maximum frequency, this causes it to scale in 300MHz steps for the default maximum policy of 1400MHz. As we now have flexrates to scale faster I did not notice any negative effects on performance and this should help battery-wise on load-"spiky" applications, and in general.

- Increased runqueue-length thresholds for the hot-plugging logic by a flat 75 for all conditions. In my opinion and experience they were too low and caused to keep the cores needlessly online. This now reduces for "average low" use the online-time of the third core considerably.

- Increased the hot-plug frequency conditions for the 4th core.

Updated the kernel from upstream to 3.0.36.

Memcopy and string function improvements, won't bring any noticeable differences.

Compilier optimizations (Roughly the same as Ninphetamine's) are now in. VFP uses the NEON libraries now. I couldn't measure any increase in any synthetic benchmarks with this though.

LFB exFat modules.

Perseus alpha16 (3/07):

Disabled touchscreen touch booster; this previously locked the CPU frequency at 800MHz, memory interface to 400MHz and bus frequency to 200MHz at any time the finger touched the screen.

Implemented flexrate capability into pegasusq; additionally added a frequency threshold above which flexrate requests are ignored. Currently this is set at 800MHz but is configurable in the governor tunables.

Enabled quality of service requests in the touchscreen driver, this currently triggers a flexrate request at a sampling period of 15ms over the governor default of 50ms, and over 5 periods, giving 75ms of heightened reactivity. It also sends a direct memory access throughput quality of service request to the the linux power management quality of service interface to guarantee a 266MHz bus frequency for 142ms. Still need to check if that the last part works correctly.

Perseus alpha14 (21/06):

Only Mali platform changes.

Remove Samsung integrated checks on in the Pegasus platform that prevented the GPU control interfaces to work. Overclocking, undervolting, and the rest now properly work.

Removal of the CPU frequency lock to 1200MHz if the GPU is at 440MHz, this is excessive as 3D load heavy applications usually do not tax the CPU that far, and is an unnecessary power consumption burden.

The thermal control unit temperature throttling causes to fix the voltage to a fixed value when throttling is in place; this is useless considering frequency is not limited, making the whole thing senseless. Thus removed.

Perseus alpha13 (20/06):

Rebased sources on a Linux branch for commit completedness. All commits reapplied and cleaned. New repo.

CIFS included as module

Busybox removed. This should be part of the ROM.

Perseus alpha12 (14/06):

Added enhanced init.d support as per dk_zero-cool's implementation.

SHA-1 improvements

Added exception to the module loading logic for the exFat driver module thus making it work. (Credit to gokhanmoral)

Perseus alpha11 (10/06):

ro.secure=0

Recovery renamed as busybox in /sbin. I'll compile a proper busybox later on, or remove it alltogether when a recovery with autoinstall is released by CF or somebody else.

Perseus alpha10 (8/06):

Overclocking up to 1800MHz. Voltages in ASV table are somewhat scaled up until 1600MHz, after that you're on your own and have to optimize yourself.

Intel claims maximum sustainable safe voltage for 32nm HKMG to be 1.4V, above that may cause electron migration to the silicon and permanently deteriorate your chip. 1700 and above only for avid overclockers and benchmark freaks. Credit to tvanhak for playing lab rat with his phone.

Samsung frequency limitation removed to scale above 1400MHz, full credit goes to Gokhanmoral for finding this hack in the kernel as it is in a very sneaky location.

Perseus alpha7 (5/06):

Reduced regulator voltage initialization minimum to 600mV, you can now undervolt that far. Be aware of crashes.

Added SIO scheduler

Some network and CRC related patches

Perseus alpha6 (4/06):

UV_mV_table support, apps like SetCPU work now.

If you have a voltage set at for example 1187500µV the output will be rounded up to be displayed at 1188mV. If you set a voltage non multiple of 12.5mV then for example, 1190mV, it will round it to the nearest valid step, being 1187.5mV. UV_uV_table is there for finer grained control but no app suports that yet.

Perseus alpha3 (4/06):

Mali: disable state tracking

Mali: GPU frequency, scaling and voltage control

Governor pegasusq: make up_threshold_at_min_freq and freq_for_responsiveness configurable values. This is the reason the Galaxy S3 is so smooth, it has super aggressive scaling values for the governor until default 500MHz.

Enabled 1500MHz per defconfig and added voltage values to ASV table for it

Added UV_uV_table for voltage control on the CPU; this is not compatible for any programm which supports undervolting right now, we need UV_mV_table for that and since we have 12.5mV steps being fed to Vdd it's not compatible for now.

Boot partitions are made visible.