[Defy Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] VoidRunner:
Hello guys,

I did something stupid.

Couple of days ago I decided that I am sick with this constant freezes of the GSM module on my defy. The core problem was that sometimes when the GSM radio is making rach-reselect of the current cell, and I am making/receiving a call in this exact moment, the Phone process is freezing. If I kill it and then kill the rild, the signal bar is empty, and my phone is declared as switched off to everyone who gives me a call. I am also unable to make outgoing calls.

Anyway long story short. I was running Froyo kernel with CM7 ontop on Defy (Red Lense). The hardware is MBM525.

Decided to give a chance to CM11 by quarx2k. Made a full dd image of all my eMMC partitions and followed the guide on quarx2k website. Flashed the bootstrap and the tried to resize, but nothing. I was just locked with frozen Google/CM7 logo.

Got into stock recovery, wiped data/cache partitions. Again I was locked with the logo.

No adb, no TWRP, no nothing. So I did flashed the original SBF with RSDLite, that my phone was comming with. Nothing, just black screen and white led. Looked here and there and found a ROM that will definately power up the device:

DEFYPLUS_U3_4.5.1-134_DFP-231_GR_SIGN_UCADEFYEMARAB1B80AA004.0R_PDS03C_USAJRDNGIBRRTCEE_P022_A022_Service1FF.sbf

True. The Defy powered, and the red Moto logo showed up (flashing this SBF was not the smartest thing I've ever done for my phone, this SBF was for MBM526).

The Android GB started and I was happy. Red a bit further on the CM11 thread and it turned out that I was with incorrect kernel, and that is why I got issues flashing the bootstrap in the first place. Now I got the correct one, so I rooted the phone with this SBF:

DEFYPLUS_U3_4.5.1-134_DFP-231_CEE_ROOTED_No_Signed.sbf

Installed SndRecovery and Custom recovery, got adb interface before android and flushed the bootstrap image to mmcblk (where /system is located). Installed the resize.zip. Rebooted, got into nice looking interface, flushed cm11 from a zip file to the newly repartiioned eMMC... etc.

Finished with CM11 Kitkat on my Defy. Wonderfull!!! Realy amazing.

However I've some issues with this version:

1) my battery is lasting less than 10hours, if I use my phone as usual (on froyo with cm7 the mileage was between 2 and 3 days, depending how many calls I made). If I have 2-3 calls for average of 15minutes (45min total GSM calls, no 3G etc), the battery life is less than 6 hours.

Tried to disable every fancy animation, downclock the CPU to 300MHz.. etc. No luck. I got around:

* 20 hours with no calls at all

* 8 hours with 5 calls, 3 minutes each.

and the Phone UI is not working correctly (the bug with the keypad not showing up).

I checked the reasons for this and with ssh did found that systemui is consuming a lot of CPU cycles.

Check with the battery applet, and com.android.systemui is taking around 40% of my battery time, Screen is 20%, AndroidOS 23%, Cell Standby 10%.

On CM7 it was something like Cell Standby 20%, Screen 40%.

Perhaps the problem is related with the fact that the battery is not charging to more than 4160V

2) The video playback using hardware decoder is not working correctly in my opinion. When I run a movie with MX player with h/w decoder the /system/bin/mediaserver is taking around 60%-80% of the CPU (same config - MX player with hw decoder, took around 5%-10% on CM7). If I go to S/W decoder, the CPU usage is the same but in favor of MX player process.

3) When I receive calls and the screen is in Landscape mode, I do not have the Phone UI where I can pick up the call. It simply does not show. There's two solutions:

* Wait 'till the end of the ringing, the person calling me hangup - I've missed call.

* Assign custom hardware key for pickin'up of incomming calls.

The second one is working, but I am unable to view who is calling me. Sometimes this is critical, since I am on a meetings and I should know who is calling me (I can ignore my coleagues, but not my boss).

I do use landscape alot. This is the only normal way for me to write on this small screen.

4) When I am starting outgoing call, It takes 2-4 seconds before the Phone UI shows up on screen. Tried various solutions. No luck.

5) Heavy RAM usage. With CM7 I got something like 200-250MB free ram, I was able to load more than 60tabs in Opera, and having FBreader loaded in Background. Now I've less than 94MB Free, and on Opera tab number 20, the app simply crashes. I know that this is not something that could be corrected. Android is a heavy OS, quite normal. Java is very heavy in terms of resources.

6) When I press and hold the Home button in order to display the recently opened applications, it is not showing right away. The lag is between 5 to 6 seconds. This means holding the home button for 3 seconds, releasing, waiting for another 6 seconds before the list shows up.

Apart from these, the UI is very responsive, and fast. I would say it is much faster than CM10 and CM9. The system is behaving wonderfull, realy nice. In some circumstances even better then CM7.

Right now on my questions:

What are the chances to go back to CM7 with GB kernel or Froyo kernel?

I know that I've flashed non-fixed SBF, which is BL7 (my bootloader version is 9.10), but I red that there's a CM7 runing with GB kernel. Where can I find this?

Is it possible to run CM7 on quarx2k kernel?

Is it possible to modify the bootstrap process so that it can run various kernel versions?

Perhaps too much talk for a single post:)