[Android General] limited_imagination:
So I finally got around to trying out Magisk, along with installing the LOS Nougat update. In for a penny, in for a pound, and thanks again to all of you who made that LOS update happen.

I tried the SuperSU manager "unroot" option first, but it sent my device into a boot loop.

So I am in your asterisk category.

Just unlucky, I guess, but by this point I can start clean with SPFT again in my sleep, since I have recovered from so many boot loops. Tedious, but far from disastrous.

Since I had to do all that again, I figured that I would try the LOS upgrade as well as Magisk.

I thought that it was interesting that this version of LOS has a built-in root option in its Settings menu. I didn't play with that at all, and just flashed Magisk using TWRP, right away after installing LOS.

The honest truth is that I haven't yet found that Magisk does anything better for me yet than SuperSU did. Maybe this will change when I play with it more, but I thought I would comment now, as it's been so long since you asked me.

I tried installing a few Magisk modules through the Magisk Manager, including LKT v. 1.8 (in "Turbo mode"), GPU Turbo Boost v.1, and YouTube Vanced v.14.10.53. Looking at the modules list, I was most interested in the ones that suggested speed improvements, although as I said earlier in this thread, I suspect that significant improvements are limited to having custom kernel settings (which don't yet exist, of course). I surmise that changing the governor from "Interactive" to "Performance" would do some useful things, but there's no way to test that theory yet.

Anyway, YouTube Vanced completely glitched out the tablet, with all things Google-Services-related force closing. I got rid of it immediately.

GPU Turbo Boost seemed to have no effect subjectively, so I got rid of that too.

Then I tried LKT, which at first seemed to have some subjective speed benefit. Gmail didn't take up to 12 seconds to open messages anyway, as it sometimes did under stock Marshmallow 6.0. But I had not played with LOS long enough prior to installing LKT to really know for sure.

I experienced lots of lock-ups and crashes, and required reboots, when using LOS + LKT. Hardware intensive apps were often screwy, like the camera app especially. I tried a few different camera apps from the Playstore, and all of them intermittently would fail. Again, I'm not sure if that was an LOS or an LKT issue, though. It never happened with stock 6.0, stock camera app, and SuperSU root.

In the interests of an objective test, I tried running Geekbench 4. Yeah, not a perfect test, nothing is, but better than an exclusively subjective opinion.

So with LOS + LKT:

My CPU benchmark results, 470 for single core and 1284 for multi core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/12898720

My "Compute" benchmark results, a RenderScript score of 877: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/compute/3957047

I then uninstalled LKT from Magisk Manager, and ran the benchmark tests again.

LOS by itself, my CPU benchmark results, 472 for single core and 1317 for multi core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/12901535

LOS by itself, my "Compute" benchmark results, a RenderScript score of 908: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/compute/3957957

It's interesting to see that LOS by itself ran higher speed benchmarks than LOS + LKT in "Turbo" mode.

As far as I can tell now, the only thing LKT did was to run the battery down faster, although maybe it was responsible for the more frequent crashes.

I will see over time, as I play with LOS by itself, whether it's more likely to crash than stock 6.0.

For context, the other TB3-850F devices running stock 6.0 often get CPU benchmarks of around 475 for single core, and 1280 for multi core. See the benchmark list: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=✓&q=tb3-850f

See also the benchmark list for the TB3-850M: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?page=1&q=tb3-850m&utf8=✓

All of the TB3-850M results on that list currently are also using stock Marshmallow 6.0 except for the last three results, which are from "my TB3-850M". This is because LOS reports itself as being a TB3-850M, but you can see that it's actually my TB3-850F, because it reports 917 MB of memory instead of 1925 MB. Of my three results on that list, the first two were run with LKT, and the last was run after I removed LKT.

For me, maybe (probably) that's more interesting than for many people here, because there probably are not that many Android apps that require a USB serial port. Most Android apps that use serial connections, use a Bluetooth connection instead of a cable. However, what I want to be able to do is to use a Linux app that uses a cable connection to connect to a car's OBD II port and log data. There is already an Android app called BtSSM that more or less does what I want by using a Bluetooth dongle, but a USB cable has faster and more reliable data transfer, and I would rather use my device's Bluetooth connection for other things, anyway.

My end game is to run Meefik's "Linux Deploy", and then run an open source Subaru OBD II logging program called Romraider, from within the Linux chroot. This stuff runs fine on a rooted TB3-850F, but Romraider can't find the ttyUSB0 serial port, because the Android kernel doesn't install the driver on boot.