[Hardware Hacking General] osm0sis:
I finally found time to complete my (pretty tedious) task of benchmarking to improve the sdcard speeds of the MX Box and vetting the rest of the proposed tweaks I'd pulled in from other devices. I'm extremely pleased with the performance at this point. This is about a calendar year later than I'd hoped and I know many have likely moved on from this device by now, but mine's working great now so let's call it "one for the road." ;)

I went back and started from scratch with my updated ramdisk base files, backported what I could script and binary-wise from Matricom's newer (1.1.6) kernel/recovery to improve TV support (especially A/V CRT). This time I modified as little of the ramdisk files as possible, instead putting all tweaks possible in /sbin/osbootscript.sh to keep everything centralized. As this is a total refresh (and many pages later) I'll redo the entire changelog over Matricom stock.

mtd4-recovery-g18ref-osmod:

https://androidfilehost.com/?w=files&flid=312881

Updated recovery recommended for use after you've got the device booting again from the "toothpick" sdcard restore method. Includes newer busybox files, remote and mouse control fixes, etc. backported from newer Matricom recovery versions. Flash using the instructions below ("recovery" partition).

mtd5-boot-g18ref-osmod2:

https://androidfilehost.com/?w=files&flid=312881

ramdisk changes:

- change mounting to via fstab to allow for tweaked mount options, improving filesystem I/O

- enable adb over TCP on boot, triggered by DHCP IP address assignment on eth0 or wlan0, and/or the new service.adb.tcp.enable property

- fix up broken permissions on a number of files allowing for proper tweaking of various sysfs entires

- leave scaling_max_freq at 1200 MHz since going past the hardcoded limit appears to actually hurt performance (was 1512 MHz in osmod)

- adjust TCP buffer sizes and thresholds to the latest from CM to improve overall connection speeds

- replace the crappy G-Box bootsplash with the "Android Open System" image.. ooh rainbows!

- add busybox and MTD-Tools (nandwrite, nanddump, flash_erase) binaries to /sbin to make life easy (thanks [MENTION=2765426]styr[/MENTION] & [MENTION=1695125]_n0p_[/MENTION])

- add my flash_image and netadb (toggle adb over TCP) scripts to /sbin to make it even easier

- add init.d script support service

- add /sbin/osbootscript.sh and run via service for further/more complicated tweaks

osbootscript.sh tweaks:

- create /system/etc/init.d/ directory and set proper permissions if it doesn't already exist

- fix governor permissions and workaround broken conservative governor directory issue

- set scaling_governor to performance, which scores better, and on a plugged device with no heat issues there's no reason not to (was conservative)

- increase the CPU scaling min freq to 696 MHz so that things are actually fast if not using performance (was 96)

- increase the Mali-400 GPU max freq to 400 MHz where it should be (was 333)

- lock frequencies to the defined kernel table for predictability in tweaking apps, stability and performance (was unlocked)

- disable some unnecessary debugging (thanks [MENTION=3292224]franciscofranco[/MENTION])

- use "reno" TCP congestion avoidance algorithm and adjust tx/rx memory buffers to massively improve throughput (was cubic)

- TCP tweaks to reduce network latency (thanks [MENTION=3685904]ak[/MENTION])

- TCP tweaks to further optimize throughput (thanks [MENTION=4793042]pkgnex[/MENTION])

- various kernel and VM tweaks (randomize_va_space, lease-break-time, swappiness) to improve responsiveness

- queue tweaks for sdcard readahead and I/O requests to improve sdcard speeds

- bdi changes to keep system from using maximum I/O bandwidth, reducing system hangs while writing to sdcard (thanks [MENTION=4671084]BenniBenassi[/MENTION])

- tune deadline I/O scheduler for better throughput while avoiding choking/hangs

- remount sysfs+sdcard with tweaked mount options to improve responsiveness

- renice (ie. increase priority of) systemui to improve responsiveness (thanks [MENTION=4615478]boype[/MENTION])

- Synapse tweaking app support

Synapse key features:

- tweak ALL the things!

- toggle /system/lib/egl/libGLES_android.so to experimentally force all rendering on the Mali GPU driver (thanks [MENTION=4671084]BenniBenassi[/MENTION])

- toggle showing the volume softkeys in the navigation bar

- toggle Dalvik2cache init.d script to save space on /data

- toggle GApps Integrator init.d script to merge updates into /system from the Play Store

- backup and restore kernel (boot.img) and Synapse setting profiles

- reboot to recovery

To Flash:

Use my flash_image script or do it directly ("boot" partition) with the MTD-Utils linked here:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?p=40409361#post40409361

After the first flash you'll always have access to both the MTD-Utils and my flash_image script from /sbin to make it easier in the future, and the netadb script will toggle adb over TCP if the adbd service ever stops or you come across some circumstances where it doesn't trigger automatically. :good:

Synapse support pictured below:

Using App Settings (Xposed Module): 178 DPI, 135 Font scale.

Other recommended app tweaks:

Gravity Box (Xposed Module). I've used it to make my system look like a decent cross between KitKat and Lollipop.

I'm also going to take this opportunity to repost a few things from previous pages so this can be a roll-up post for the entire thread. Matricom's support is still shoddy and their latest ROM releases for the MX Box aren't very stable, don't support as many TVs as the old ones, and the update procedure has bricked many devices. To my knowledge and in my experience [MENTION=4671084]BenniBenassi[/MENTION]'s modded Matricom MX2 v1.15+ ROM is still the all-around best as of this posting.

Lastly, the other automated backup method I created for the MX Box, using adb over TCP and a Windows batch script:

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=48550498&postcount=107

Enjoy your pimped out MX Box and have fun with all the tweaking power of Synapse! :D :cowboy: :cool:

Edit

: Rehosted again at AFH, and below since BasketBuild appears to have died again. :rolleyes: