[General Questions and Answers] baqar79:
Unfortunately I; being a new user can't post currently in the forum (at least until I rack up a few posts); but hopefully the developer Tkkg1994 might see this.

First off, i'm fairly happy with this Kernel; it seems to be reliable and reasonably fast (at least with a few changes!), and does provide decent battery life (3Days, 15 hours w/ 7 hours screen on time is my record so far). I use it mostly to stream video (Netflix, Crunchyroll) and with netflix especially I get around 7.5 minutes -> 8 minutes per percentage point (1/2 brightness);

This is especially encouraging since when I purchased this phone, I had every intention of rooting the phone (and voiding my warranty!), and I knew at that stage about Samsung's ASV chip binning; I had a lot of fun undervolting my previous S3 to extend the battery life; so I was a bit worried about what quality chip I would get as I handed my hard earned money to the salesman.

See I have terrible luck with chip binning quality for some reason; Ever since I found that my newly purchased Celeron 566MHz could not be overclocked to 850MHz despite the numerous successess of others, I tend to attract bad bin quality chips, so much so I yearn to simply get an average chip that happens to be somewhere in the bulk of that lovely bell curve. but alas...:

ASV_SUMMARY:

big:2, LITTLE:1, INT:10, MIF:7, G3D:10, ISP:10

I think that makes me class E; As I understand it, big:2 is the lowest you can get; and LITTLE:1 is also the lowest. I win!; unfortunately, not the lottery ticket, but the lightning bolt from the heavens :D

Alright now I got that off my chest, There are some positives that help alleviate this most voltage hungry Exynos 8890 chip. For example, I have managed to undervolt reasonably well (Although to be fair my undervolts are probably equivalent to moving to stock voltages for a good percentage of Galaxy S7 owners out there). I shaved 100mV of the A72 (big) chip's 2.6GHz bringing me down to 1.1v and for most of the other speeds I have managed to drop 125mV. I have managed to drop 100mV on the little(A53) chips speeds.

Now on to some useful information (finally..hopefully?).

I am not an expert, so within synapse, I do not understand all options available to me. But I noticed that unlike the stock Samsung Kernel, getting all 4 of the 'big' cores to work wasn't happening. I found that Geekbench 3 and Antutu weren't really using those extra cores. However, changing the option "Exynos Hotplug" to Disabled fixed this; certainly helped my scores and despite the promised higher power consumption of having those 2 additional cores on all the time, I did not see much change to my battery life.

There is a bug I noticed where Synapse keeps trying to change my big cores minimum speed to 312MHz despite being told not to do it for some reason. I'm always having to hit the 'x" option every time I open Synapse to make sure it leaves my minimum speed at the custom 628MHz. I do not know whether this is a bug with the kernel or with synapse however, so it may not be useful.

In addition, I've noticed that when I first installed Synapse, it seemed to set the Big core voltages to values which while seemingly average, seem far too low for my ASV:2 grade ****ty floor scraping quality chip. It seemed to come right when I attempted to reinstall the system again, but it may be worth checking to make sure the Kernel reads the correct values (if that is indeed a kernel problem rather than a synapse problem.)

I've also noticed this with my GPU voltages. I may be looking at the wrong thing, but here is the ASV_GROUP frequencies and voltages for G3D:

G3D LV3 freq : 650000 volt : 1137500, group: 10

G3D LV4 freq : 600000 volt : 1125000, group: 10

G3D LV5 freq : 572000 volt : 1068750, group: 10

G3D LV6 freq : 546000 volt : 1025000, group: 10

G3D LV7 freq : 455000 volt : 981250, group: 10

G3D LV8 freq : 419000 volt : 931250, group: 10

G3D LV9 freq : 338000 volt : 887500, group: 10

G3D LV10 freq : 260000 volt : 850000, group: 10

Yet without me doing any undervolting, my GPU voltages look like this:

650MHz: 706.25mV

600MHz: 687.5mV

546MHz: 668.75mV

419MHz: 618.75mV

338MHz: 600mV

260MHz: 600mV

It looks like the stock synapse gpu settings are hugely undervolting the GPU...now it seems to be perfectly stable, which could mean that despite having poor CPU's at least the GPU is up to the task, though those undervolts seem rather extreme. What could be happening is that the voltages may be displaying these values, but are actually running at the stock settings; may be worth a look.

In addition for anyone wanting to undervolt there CPU; I highly recommend disabling exynos hotplugging.

The reason why is that I seemed to think I had found a stable voltage configuration with the 2 cores hotplugging only to discover massive instability when forcing all four cores on. I suspect this is because the overall ASV is determined by the lowest grade core of the 4, and so I did not hit any problems since the system was rarely using those 2 additional cores, even within stress testing benchmarks.

I certainly had to add more volts to get it stable, but overall the performance is higher and battery life is probably the most I can hope for out of the Grade E setup I have.

Sorry about the story length first post; but my thanks to Tkkg1994 for creating a very stable, configurable kernel for the Samsung S7