yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Epic 4G General] Whosdaman:
I'm going to say, this thread is about to be closed. Excessive flamming for 1, and for 2 the number of misconstrued reports.

EXT4 is known to damage NAND devices, such as the Bell Vibrant. If anyone has been folling the issue with Bell, they have been directly linked to the Voodoo Lagfix.

However, I will keep this thread open as a precaution to all members to beware of the dangers of EXT4. Neither Dameon nor Noobnl are wrong. Both can be right at the same time. It is possible.

Like I said, if there continues to be flamming of such magnitude I will infract and start banning users, and this goes for both sides.

As well this is being moved to General section.

Thanks,

WDM
[Epic 4G General] kenvan19:
Thank you Whosdaman! I'm sure I can speak for a few of us who are grateful for the opportunity to continue this open discussion in an adult manner. :)
[Epic 4G General] jbadboy2007:
He should close it due to the misinformation and it might cause unproductive development with our phone............
[Epic 4G General] jbadboy2007:
NO.. you did something wrong. wipe and flash stock then try this again.
[Epic 4G General] MeetFace:
So, would you say that EXT4 is dangerous like Radiation is dangerous (STAY AWAY), or like a computer virus is dangerous (take precautions to avoid damage)?
[Epic 4G General] Whosdaman:
nope, this will actually help people better understand it
[Epic 4G General] italyhot21:
im sticking to this Dameon87 after some alot of research i agree with with. thanks man for all the work
[Epic 4G General] snowmanwithahat:
1. Data retention simply refers to the amount of time the data will be readable, irrelevant to the issue at hand

2. The only thing that matters is whether or not RFS writes less than EXT4.

The facts are that writes kill NAND memory, plain and simple, that's it.

I'm swinging towards noobnl on this one purely because I doubt Samsung would have created RFS and implemented it if current EXT2/3/4 was suitable for their specific NAND chips in place. They don't do it to make things difficult for us, they don't do it to purposely make their phone slower... Use some logic guys, they did it for a reason.

To the note about returns and insurance.... if the NAND is DEAD, like won't be read from, they'll never know you were running a different file-system. They can't know you had a custom bootloader or ROM or Kernal.... it's impossible to know its modded if the NAND is broken completely.

Also, this whole filesystem thing is the exact same boat as Kernals, ROMS, rooting..... be warned that it MAY damage your device.

Even though earlier I said they probably did RFS for a reason, I doubt EXT4 will hurt much. It could probably be most easily compared to overclocking a processor. It'll hurt the life of it, and some of us will over-volt and watercool and do lap our cpus.... but in reality we will all be (likely) with a new phone by the time it matters or the technology will be obsolete.

Happy modding, do it with caution, and do it politely, everyone spends a lot of time and energy doing what they do to help this community
[Epic 4G General] volDeus:
I say go with hot pink caution tape to bring attention to yourself, a MOD like that is one you want to show off. Kinda like a racing stripe.
[Epic 4G General] plapczyn:
They did it because it is FAT16/32 compatible and they use it for WinMO. There is your reason. Read the RFS info from Samsung. Also RFS was created before 2006....EXT4 (stable) was released in 2008.

We in the software industry do stupid/illogical things all of the time because of legacy software....case in point-Windows Millennium.
[Epic 4G General] tehdarkknight:
I'm going to weigh in here and agree with Dameon. oneNAND wear leveling is performed at the hardware level using XSR (eXtended Sector Remapping), which means any "quiet" filesystem is suitable for Samsung's NAND chips. The simple fact that our oneNAND chips are mounted `relatime` with RFS means more writes than ext4 will use. oneNAND is also SLC (Single-Layer Cell) NAND, which is more reliable than MLC NAND.

There is no harm in formatting oneNAND with ext4. In fact, I support it since it also gives us an opportunity to ditch Samsung's source-less RFS kernel modules, and should prove to be more reliable and higher performing than RFS.

noobnl, if you're going to present sources of information in a discussion, quoting yourself in IRC is not acceptable, nor is it presentable as a fact or even a reliable source.

This is just an overview of oneNAND, which lists the features at the bottom.

http://www.samsung.com/global/busin...nmemory/downloads/onenand_brochure_200609.pdf
[Epic 4G General] snowmanwithahat:
Thanks, I didn't actually know that. I was going off of assumptions that I made about the use of a proprietary file-system.

One thing to consider though is that (most) file-systems have been designed with hard drives in mind, where write-counts were never taken into consideration. This may be different with the use of SSDs in the future and RFS may or may not have taken that into account.
[Epic 4G General] elevenpoint7five:
I don't mean this in any negative way whatsoever, it is a sincere question. If EXT4 is so bad, why is the Cyanogen team(which seems to be headed up by noobnl, at least for this phone) offering their ROM with an EXT4 kernel?

Personally, I'm steering clear of it for the time being. Not because of the possible dangers, but because my ROM of choice recently released an EXT4 version but it seems like it has some issues.

Again, not taking sides or trying to be an ass, just asking a question.

Andy
[Epic 4G General] iil:
team noobl.
[Epic 4G General] kenvan19:
I was actually going to ask this myself, thanks for getting it out there in a non-offensive way thats what I was waiting for...didn't want to sound accusatory!
[Epic 4G General] rigg3d:
My two cents.

I have used ROMs developed by both NoobNL and Daemon and appreciate both of your work with the EPIC. With that said I am currently running Daemons ROM with EXT4 and notice a huge difference in performance over the old file system. So im sticking with it.

Now... with that said.... How about we have a Collaboration to create a SUPER ROM or Super MOD for the EPIC from these two great developers? .... hehe... just a thought. If we have great minds like this work together just think of the possibilities.

Thank u... and I'm out.
[Epic 4G General] AmnChode:
But wasn't the Bell Vibrants getting toasted by the OTA Froyo release, as well...hence why Bell halted the fielding for a short while? I remember reading through the comments on Android Central and they had quite a few guys running bone stock Vibrants puking after the froyo update.

After a little research, found this thread: http://xdaforums.com/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=3264

Most of the dead Vibrants there are without lagfix...

Sounds to me like those chips were destined to fail to begin with, regardless of what file system they were running...
[Epic 4G General] darren.wlsn1:
yes this is a very good point and you beat me to it.
[Epic 4G General] bnl552:
I wasn't aware that sleep could be quantified in units of mass...
[Epic 4G General] ecooce:
I have worked out all the bugs in my ROM,and Ill be sticking with EXT4...I have researched more then I wanted to on this subject,and I have come to the conclusion that EXT4 will write the same if not less than RFS...I remeber when I had a Moment and EXT2 was being used,lost data left and right and had to redo atleast 3 times because of it.Then we moved to EXT3 which had journaling,much better and safer.Now I get to play with EXT4...
[Epic 4G General] jdelano:
Awesome

Excellent thread (sans the petty bickering). I remember these types of discussions for the moment and EXT2.

I am of the mind that I want faster if I can get, I have a best buy insurance plan, the guy said.. no matter what I do, if the phone no workie.. I get a new one ... after I showed him my ReMixed Moment.

I have 2 SSD drives here in my machine (so sweeeet) and I feel much more comfortable with EXT4 after reading this debate for sure.

The android community never ceases to amaze with their depth of knowledge and passion for their technology. love it!!!

Thanks to the devs... you guys rock!!
[Epic 4G General] gTen:
The thing about EXT4 is it is not meant for Flash Memory in specific...YAFFS and RFS are made for Flash Memory..

From what I read some people say EXT4 has more wear then RFS, others say the opposite..but so far the consensus seems to be that it would still last years...

Overall though we use Samsung's OneNand, Galaxy S uses Samsung's MoviNAND and for some reason the Nexus S uses Sandisk's iNAND..

I am still wondering why samsung/google decided to dump MoviNAND and go with iNAND..

Is there any way to monitor reads and writes?
[Epic 4G General] nubsors:
Just wanted to thanks Noob for the information. I appreciate it. I am unsure at this time whether or not I will revert back because I love the performance increase. As for the discussion pertaining to using insurance to replace a destroyed phone I will say that I pay for the insurance to protect my phone from acts of God and my own stupidity. Luckily I am typically able to solve my own problems or find answers where I need them so I highly doubt I will need to use my insurance.
[Epic 4G General] nubsors:
Morality is subjective. Some people think that having a child out of wedlock is immoral. Some think that having multiple wives is perfectly moral. I'm not here to judge morality, I simply don't believe that I am in the wrong by making a claim against insurance I pay for. It is up to Sprint to use due diligence to make sure that my phone falls within their coverage.
[Epic 4G General] aal1:
noobnl vs daemon87 is like ford vs chevy.....both rock in their own right. so im not taking sides either way....but I gotta say this last quote I listed above kinda lines it out good for me...why did they change to the different method for NAND? Is it quantitative ? Can we measure reads and writes, and has anyone actually done the black and white work? Seems to me that would put the whole issue to bed.......you know, 1 hour of banging the heck out of a phone opening and closing apps or downloading big hunks of data and deleteing them....side by side what does what with actual numbers.

Until then, I just read this as a PSA from noobnl that something might happen, take it at your own risk...and another dev countering it just like any tech would in a typical tech vs tech battle that would see any day of the week at any IT shop...
[Epic 4G General] ptfdmedic:
Also there were reports of phones failing again after being fixed. Bad chips seems to be a reasonable assumption.
[Epic 4G General] warlar12:
Right now I'm trying to figure out what the difference of EXT4 and RFS is. Is EXT4 faster or superior to RFS? To me it is chevy vs. ford, like it was said earlier. Until someone actually goes and makes an effort to explain to the community what each file system is, there is no need to argue about speculations.

Concerning what I said about explaining the file systems

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=900041
[Epic 4G General] vitreoush:
Ext4 is a newer filesystem, used primarily on linux. While not explicitly a flash memory filesystem, it's been chosen by Google as the filesystem of choice for android 2.3 and later-as well as google's enormous datacenters). Supposedly (though i am no filesystem guru, unlike the fantastic devs on this site) it reaches a balance between speed and data integrity. On the epic, ext4 carries some very concrete benefits. It speeds boot and shutdown times, noticably improves app loading times and appears to eliminate the irritating lag sometimes seen after turning on the screen, not to mention the seconds long lag between trying to create an app shortcut or the crazy lag seen in installing a new app.

The concern is really that the epic was not born with ext4, and many are worried that samsung must have used rfs (an inferior filesystem by all accounts, ultimately a derivation of the venerable but extremely aged fat16/32) for a reason. Mostly the concern seems to be that rfs must have some hidden wear leveling used by samsung to slow nand write degradation, leveling not believed to be present in ext4. This has never been confirmed, nor has any intrinsic write-load superiority for rfs.

Ultimately, a good half-way point in this debate would be to use YAFFS2, a filesystem designed specifically for the problems of flash memory, one that appears to be endorsed for use on oneNAND in the nexus s by google. Honestly, corrupt nand memory is largely a theoretical risk in today's disposable tech gadgets. Yes, over time the risk of cell failure increases, but these mtfs tend to be years if at all under most consumer use situations. I'm sure that if you used the nand in your phone as hard as google or samsung do during product testing, you might want to switch over to a more tailored filesystem to prevent failure as well.

Ultimately, few of us except for the devs ever run our lovely gadgets hard enough to cause significant flash failures. I too thought i wouldnt notice a difference between rfs and ext4, but then said what the hell, and tried it. Man, it has made my phone speedy as all get out. Im willing to take some of this theoretical risk with the foreknowledge that it might ultimately break my phone. But then again, im flashing new roms and mods all the time, and i sure as hell know that the risks of that bricking my phone are greater than almost anything else i could do(except use my phone in the rain, and you know what, i do that too sometimes, and it hasnt burned me yet). Long story short, im staying with ext4, unless someone can port yaffs2 compatibility to the phone.

Corrected for spelling and punctuation.
[Epic 4G General] diego1985:
I was worried with everyone hoping on the Ext4 bandwagon in the viper Rom dev section. After reviewing the info from you guys im going to stay where im at on RFS. Hopefully more devs will give us the option to choose between the two in the future.
[Epic 4G General] konaman:
All this doesn't even matter to me. Chances are that ill have a new phone before my epic explodes and if not who cares ill just buy another one.

Its gonna be a personal preference if anyone wants to go to ext4. Just like when you mod anything cars, computers, phones or whatever you are changing what the manufacture researched, tested and built to be "safe" to their standards.

I'm not worried about it. I like ext4 and I'm gonna stay on it till this thing shuts down or I'm on a new phone anyway. I say happy modding and have fun with what we have here. Or play it safe and leave it alone.
[Epic 4G General] crookedbudha:
More then likely nothing more complicated then cost per unit. You might be surprised how often thats the real answer.
[Epic 4G General] kenvan19:
Wow what an informative post. Thank you!

Sent from my ext4 Epic 4G running Bonsai4all 1.1.3!
[Epic 4G General] dwallersv:
All true.

However, this is an ethic of, "if I can get away with it". Not my system of ethics.

There's little point in debating, or getting into a flamewar, over this. The simple fact is, there are plenty of unethical people out there that will breech a contract they voluntarily agreed to if it is to their advantage, and the risk of consequences are vanishingly small -- while at the same time scream bloody murder if someone does the same to them.

The word for this is "dishonest". It speaks to their fundamental character, their integrity (or lack thereof).

To others, one's word is one's bond, and faithfully abiding argeements they enter into is as important as holding others to agreements made with them.

What "screw" really boils down to in this context, when referring to service providers and device manufacturers is, "I can't get exactly what I want". Whether it's hardware, or service terms.

Am I happy with everything from Sprint? Hell no! I have many, if not most, of the same complaints as everyone else here. However, I agreed to those terms, with open eyes, because I wanted an Epic (I came over from an Omnia II on Verizon).

As an honest person, I would never breech the contracts I read, and signed, when I got this phone. Failing to read what one signs is foolish; reading those contracts knowing one is going to breech them is fraud.

Many convince themselves that they are not dishonest, or criminal frauds, on the basis of "David vs. Goliath" reasoning. Yet, when people cheat them, they always have their redux justifying it as well.

Very telling is the ad hominem that spews forth against people calling for simply following the law and criticizing the ethical lapse of cheating on contracts with carriers. I expect some of that in response to this post. It's very sad.
[Epic 4G General] Top Nurse:
The short answer:

If you want to root your phone and play around then have the same guts to say I screwed up and it is no ones fault except my own.
[Epic 4G General] jocala:
You look beautiful today Mrs. Cleaver, and what a lovely dress!
[Epic 4G General] SINNN:
Wait. U telling me ext4 will brick mah fone? Dear mother! Are u all serious about this? I liked the speef boost ext4 gave mah fone. Or is this a april fools joke from Evo owners? Btw.. Noobl... No more leaks for the noobs for ripping on you for dk28 huh? Dam noobs ruin it for us.
[Epic 4G General] SINNN:
Ya. Noobl takes tounge lashes in here like a ho gettin pimp slap for not bringing in mo money. Theres some real e-hating going on.
[Epic 4G General] SINNN:
Dear god. Im effed. I flash at least 3 times daily. 7 days a week.
[Epic 4G General] CapsLockKey:
Some good points made, but it ignores the fact that Sprint/Samsumg used deceptive marketing bordering on outright lies in order to con some people into signing said contract. Promises of a timely update that would add functionality and fix various problems with the phone that weren't made aware to the purchaser. Which is worse, breeching a signed contract or defrauding people into signing it?

Maybe if they had done what they had said they'd do, you wouldn't have so many people taking risks with 2nd hand roms in the first place.
[Epic 4G General] snowmanwithahat:
So, my naive assessment is that ext4 COULD be bad, but mostly because of journaling.... Which every ext4 rom I've seen disables.

The worst thing about ext4 as it stands with the implementation on roms is the fact that if you battery pull at a bad time you can cause file system corruption. I've had this twice now and out can be annoying. reflash and it's fixed though.

Really guys this is pretty much a dead subject

Sent from my Nexus S with a keyboard
[Epic 4G General] dr_gibberish:
This IS a dead subject. Read through this thread: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=900930

Plenty of people running EXT4 for a month or more and not showing ANY increase in bad blocks. While it MAY still cause more problems than RFS down the line, those problems do not seem likely to add up to anything significant within the realistic usable life of the phone. If it is a problem four years from now I will be 2 generations of phone past this one...
[Epic 4G General] covsound1:
ext 4

all this talk do you ever notice its not a true EXT4 file system.only gms phones get that like my cappy. if this system kills the phone one day so be it! lol . love all the play as i learn.
[Epic 4G General] snowmanwithahat:
Yeh, that's why I mentioned 2 posts back that this will not kill your flash any faster than normal as long as they have the journaling disabled... I haven't found one that doesn't so far
[Epic 4G General] cohiba_man:
Been on ext4 for a month now. No degradation here.
[Epic 4G General] running_the_dream:
This seems to be the same issue that popped up when SSDs starting to proliferate. Being that the technology is the same (our phones use flash chips like SSDs), just turn off journaling and you're good to go. Noobnl confirmed that EXT4 uses some wear leveling (maybe not as extensively as TRIM on Windows 7 computers) as well. So yes, eventually, the blocks will wear out but 100k writes would take at least a few years. I would expect folks would have moved on to a new phone by then anyway.
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] shyamk:
Has anyone tried rooting htc desire without using unrevoked ? I have an exploit which gives me root access.

So, how do I go about flashing custom recovery image and boot image ?

Further, how do I ensure that the root access is permanent ?

The reason I ask is that when I use unrevoked, the phone simply hangs after doing the pre-boot sequence.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks

Shyam
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] b3ndik:
Before we had unrevoked we had to do it manually, I can see if I find it after school. To flash a custom recovery image you must install sdk on your computer and download the recovery.img and place it in the "tools" folder inside androidSDK. Then open cmd from tools and type "fastboot flash recovery nameofrecovery.img" while the phone is in fastboot mode.
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] mercianary:
If you have root you could s-off your device. Then you could flash a recovery from fastboot.
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] shyamk:
I tried using fastboot to flash a recovery image, and I got a secure failed message.

How do I do s-off without a permanent root ? I have an exploit that gives me temporary root access.

Shyam
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] AndroHero:
have you set your device to "charge only" and unticked the ask me box in connect to pc? when using unrevoked.
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] shyamk:
Yes, I did.
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] AndroHero:
whats your hboot? you can manually root on the earlier hboots
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] shyamk:
0.93.0001 is my hboot.

Shyam
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] EddyOS:
unrEVOked works fine on that HBOOT, either a driver issue or you've got a PVT4 Desire in which case you'll need to read the other thread in General
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] b3ndik:
remember to uninstall htc sync, but leave the drivers on the pc. i did that mistake once
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] shyamk:
I use a Mac and hence, no HTC sync.
[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Droidzone:
Mac and Linux dont need special drivers. You need to post the errorcode when using Unrevoked.
[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Margaliini:
I absolutely love PowerAMP, but I've noticed that it eats quite a lot battery. Without any album art downloading and scrobbling, my battery drains approximately 6-8 % per hour while using PA.

What kind of consumption-levels do others get?

In idle mode my SGS consumes circa 1 % per hour.
[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] MaxMP:
1. Charge battery, get few files into playlist in PA, set to repeat all, hit play, leave for like 8 hours, write down battery %;

2. repeat the same for stock player,

3. compare the results.

For me (sgs 2.2 stock, no other apps), it's a complete match, i.e. same percentage of battery was used for the same files played for same number of hours. Though, PowerAMP was with Eq and Tone enabled.