[Nexus 5 Android Development] Technecium:
Dr. Herbert West's Re-Animated Franco Kernel Staging branch Kernel

a.k.a. Dr. West's Re-Animated Kernel

The short story ...

This is, for all intents and purposes, Franco Kernel. However, I have worked to cherry-pick commits

from the nightlies branch and apply them to the staging branch. I feel some great commits were lost

in the rebase and since I can't find the specific commits that make it great, I decided to just

carry on, adding commits from the nightlies branch to staging.

The long story ...

On March 19, 2014 Francisco Franco decided to rebase his kernel which is currently the nightlies

branch. To my understanding the reason was that users were complaining of various bugs, glitches,

etc. He had applied many CAF commits and was unable to determine where things were going wrong.

He was faced with a decision, find the problem or rebase? He chose to rebase. Since then, the

kernel has continued to get better and better!

"Then why are you using the staging branch?" you might be asking. Well, I was never plagued by

the problems other complained about and was really happy with r35. In fact, there is a little

nugget of gold with great value to me, hiding away in this branch! Let me explain.

On r35, when playing audio through PowerAmp, the CPU stays steady at 300mhz. Also, the way the

kernel selects which speed to run at seems to be more consistent. Apps, such as audio/video players,

seem to maintain a steady speed. Since r36 this has not been the case, audio/media players will

ramp up to 1GHz+ for no apparent reason. I was able to isolate one commit that as been applied to

the nightlies branch but the ramping up still continues.

This brings me to the nugget of gold! I have been able to determine there are about 1100 commits in

the staging branch that have not made it into the nightlies branch. The odds of finding the one or

two commits that reduce the ramping up are pretty slim. Believe me, I have tried.

Therefore, I have decided to re-animate the staging branch and work to bring commits from nightlies.

What is different?

The biggest difference is it is based on the "staging" branch

I've added 96Mhz, 192Mhz and 249Mhz CPU speeds.

Compiled with Linaro 4.8 (2014.03)

There will be no test builds, only releases that coincide with Franco Kernel.

The version will have a trailing a, b, c, etc. Each letter represents a build that has had past commits merged within that release. For example, the current version is r55a. Presently, there are about 120 commits from nightlies that I have to go through. If I merge some old commits before r56, the kernel will be released as r55b, r55c, etc.

What is the same?

many hundreds of commmits from the “nightlies” branch

initramfs files

Default FKU settings (see Notes)

Notes...

1. The FKU settings I change on my device are as follows... updated 06/30/2014

1a. If you are using a build named Re-animator-t** I suggest only changing the Minimum Frequency to 96000 and let me know how battery life is.

Minimum CPU frequency 96MHz

go_highspeed_load 95

highspeed_freq 192000

input_boost_freq 1036800

sync_freq 96000

target_loads 85 96000:90 192000:95 300000:98 600000:99

up_threshold_any_cpu_freq 300000

cpufreq_unplug_limit 1800000​

2. For a long time I used PowerAmp, however I have recently switched to Rocket Music Player. Which you use is up to you but I believe RMP has a slightly less demanding UI.

3. At one point I suggested using Powersave governor to maximize battery. However, I think it does more harm than good, and has been removed.

4. I accept "Thanks" as payment.

5. Any monetary donations should be sent to Francisco Franco.

Downloads -- Source -- Changes/Commits