The RAM really is too small

[Guest Epic-Emodude]

Exactly.

As I mentioned before somewhere, I'm really not an Apple fanboy.

But the iPhone OS is just awesome when it comes to performance.

The iPod Touch 2G and iPhone 3G (maybe even 3Gs) have very similar (even lower) specs, but are able to run high-quality games without any problems.

My iPod Touch 2G that has 128 MB RAM and 532 MHz CPU frequency runs every game like a champ!

Where do we start with optimising Android for our phones then?

[Guest BigBearMDC]

Where do we start with optimising Android for our phones then?

I really don't know.

I'm not enough into the deeper strucutre of Android yet.

But I think the most potential lies in the Dalvik VM.

[Guest goce.nakov]

Where do we start with optimising Android for our phones then?

On Huawei site,cry to give us the source code :-)

[Guest Epic-Emodude]

I really don't know.

I'm not enough into the deeper strucutre of Android yet.

But I think the most potential lies in the Dalvik VM.

Isn't one of the reasons that the iTouch is so much faster despite its lower specs that iPhone OS (at the moment) can only do one thing at once, whereas android is doing more than one thing and so it runs slowly...

[Guest BigBearMDC]

Isn't one of the reasons that the iTouch is so much faster despite its lower specs that iPhone OS (at the moment) can only do one thing at once, whereas android is doing more than one thing and so it runs slowly...

With the jailbreak it is already possible to keep some apps alive.

As an example, in school I minimized some games during the lesson, but I could though surf the net without noticing anything ;)

So mutltitasking shouldn't be a problem either for the iPhone OS.

[Guest Epic-Emodude]

With the jailbreak it is already possible to keep some apps alive.

As an example, in school I minimized some games during the lesson, but I could though surf the net without noticing anything ;)

So mutltitasking shouldn't be a problem either for the iPhone OS.

Fair Enough. Would it be an idea just to build these optimisations into a 2.2 ROM if we ever get the source as we will be building that from the ground up?

[Guest mapero]

I am not family with all the android stuff.

Would it make sense to move app, app-private and dalvik-cache to SD Card and create a swap-file (i know, custom kernel is needed) in the data partition?

Can we move /data/data to SD Card by the way? Does this make sense(speed&stability)?

[Guest BigBearMDC]

I am not family with all the android stuff.

Would it make sense to move app, app-private and dalvik-cache to SD Card and create a swap-file (i know, custom kernel is needed) in the data partition?

Can we move /data/data to SD Card by the way? Does this make sense(speed&stability)?

Someone moved /data/data to the SD, but only to gain some more free memory.

I also thought of placing the swap partition on the phone memory (I think its a swap partition rather than a swap file).

But therefore we'd have to find a way to partition the phone internal memory ...

[Guest Epic-Emodude]

Someone moved /data/data to the SD, but only to gain some more free memory.

I also thought of placing the swap partition on the phone memory (I think its a swap partition rather than a swap file).

But therefore we'd have to find a way to partition the phone internal memory ...

Can this not be done with update.app files, which someone in this forum is working on creating custom ones so we might be able to do it?

[Guest Richard_Arkless]

I know this is kinda off topic but I remember a while ago that someone was asking whether it was possible to overclock the pulse and bigbear said it was possible, where are we on that and why hasn't paul implemented it yet into his rom?

Also what is the highest we can get upto with overclocking, 700mhz?

Edited June 20, 2010 by Richard_Arkless

[Guest Tom G]

Someone moved /data/data to the SD, but only to gain some more free memory.

I also thought of placing the swap partition on the phone memory (I think its a swap partition rather than a swap file).

But therefore we'd have to find a way to partition the phone internal memory ...

Putting swap on the nand has the same down side as putting in on the sd card, the nand has limited write cycles. The differences is that if you kill the sd card its easy (and cheap) to replace.

I had a brief look into repartitioning the nand. It doesn't look hard (you can get access to the full nand rather than the individual partitions). I just need to read the kernel code to see how it finds the boundarys of the partitions. Repartitioning may brick the phone, so I don't really want to test it on the one I use daily. If anyone can get me another phone (they are hard to get here), it would make testing things like this a lot easier. The 1.5 partition layout has some space that appears to be unused (mostly before the boot partition).

[Guest Azurren]

I know this is kinda off topic but I remember a while ago that someone was asking whether it was possible to overclock the pulse and bigbear said it was possible, where are we on that and why hasn't paul implemented it yet into his rom?

Also what is the highest we can get upto with overclocking, 700mhz?

Tbh overclocking won't make any visible changes to the speed of the device as the RAM is the bottleneck. You see there are many devices clocked at a similar speed and they run a lot faster

[Guest mapero]

Is something similar possible with the pulse? Seems not to be hard.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=566410

cat /proc/iomem

00100000-007fffff : smi

10000000-17ffffff : System RAM

  10050000-10468fff : Kernel text

  1046a000-105b15b7 : Kernel data

  11100000-118fffff : ebi

[...]

But we need the kernel source for this. ;)

[Guest BigBearMDC]

Is something similar possible with the pulse? Seems not to be hard.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=566410

cat /proc/iomem

00100000-007fffff : smi

10000000-17ffffff : System RAM

  10050000-10468fff : Kernel text

  1046a000-105b15b7 : Kernel data

  11100000-118fffff : ebi

[...][/code]


But we need the kernel source for this. :(


I think this has already been asked earlier ... no I don't think this works with our Pulse.


Regarding overclocking, yap ~700MHz is the maximum.

The problem I was facing was that the driver was also modified by Huawei.

But Andy Stormont told me that in some cases this ARM drivers do the same only in a different way.

So I'll see if I can get the generic HTC driver working and patch it then ;)

OFC I'll wait until the .29 source is officially released.

Same for multitouch...


Best regards,

BigBear

[Guest Basher52]

A bad engineered driver might be the main problem. Once i found deep inside the Android rom a file, setting swap memory to 32 megabytes. At home, ill search for this again.

Some user around here have a great speed aprovement with "move cache for root user" App from market.

This could be the solution as well, a greater swap located on sd card.

Greets, Basher

Edited June 21, 2010 by Basher52

[Guest Speckles]

528 MHz and 192 MB RAM are huge!

192 MB RAM means that the Pulse is able to store 1610612736 values!

Sorry, I've just read this thread for the first time, and these two values stick out to me as being very odd.

Care to explain how you get these figures? I'm a little confused.

Secondly, we know the kernel only uses 128MB of RAM, so what is the other 64MB used for?

[Guest BigBearMDC]

Sorry, I've just read this thread for the first time, and these two values stick out to me as being very odd.

Care to explain how you get these figures? I'm a little confused.

Secondly, we know the kernel only uses 128MB of RAM, so what is the other 64MB used for?

192[MB] * 1024[kB] * 1024[byte] * 8[bit] = 1610612736 ;)

I don't know what happens with the last 64MB, maybe they're allocated to the Dalvik VM?

Edited June 23, 2010 by BigBearMDC

[Guest Speckles]

I would have thought the Dalvik VM would be running under the Kernel, so would be using the memory allocated to that.

So we have 192MB RAM, 64MB unknown (I'm guessing Radio processor), leaving us with 128MB.

12MB is reserved for the ADSP (Fair enough)

8MB is reserved for the GPU (Does it really need this much?)

8MB is reserved for the MDP (No idea what this is)

2MB is reserved for the FB (I thought the resolution was 320x240, so why not 150-300KB?)

Leaving 98MB for the OS and applications.

Wow, that's tiny for an embedded Linux platform.

At least we know now why every other Android phone has 256MB of RAM as a minimum.

Or maybe we can 'tweak' the above values slightly by recompiling the kernel? (Never done that, wouldn't know where to start)

[Guest DanWilson]

With the jailbreak it is already possible to keep some apps alive.

As an example, in school I minimized some games during the lesson, but I could though surf the net without noticing anything ;)

So mutltitasking shouldn't be a problem either for the iPhone OS.

You jailbroken too? Awesome sauce!!!

But this is really irritating me so much! I want the keyboard to live and open when I want it to!!!

[Guest hk300]

huawei /PCCW introduced the U8220+ which has 256M instead of 192M.

Am i correct to assume that it would now be possible to modify the standard U8220 to 256M

BUT ... would these additional 64M make a big difference?

Edited June 29, 2010 by hk300

[Guest Tom G]

So we have 192MB RAM, 64MB unknown (I'm guessing Radio processor), leaving us with 128MB.

I think the 64mb is for radio. I have seen a few other devices that appear to include radio memory in the quoted total. Does anyone have detailed photos of the circuit board? It would be interesting to see where the chips are located (and also what type of chips they are). The only photos I have seen are the US FCC photos and the detail is very poor.

12MB is reserved for the ADSP (Fair enough)

8MB is reserved for the GPU (Does it really need this much?)

8MB is reserved for the MDP (No idea what this is)

2MB is reserved for the FB (I thought the resolution was 320x240, so why not 150-300KB?)

Where do these numbers come from? By GPU I assume you mean graphics processor, and by FB, frame buffer. Wouldn't they be the same thing? MDP = Mobile Display Processor, so again wouldn't that be the same as GPU and FB? 18MB for a 320x240 display sounds like a lot.

  1 /* drivers/video/msm_fb/mdp.c

  2  *

  3  * MSM MDP Interface (used by framebuffer core)

  4  *

  5  * Copyright (C) 2007 QUALCOMM Incorporated

  6  * Copyright (C) 2007 Google Incorporated

  7  *

  8  * This software is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public

  9  * License version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation, and

 10  * may be copied, distributed, and modified under those terms.

 11  *

 12  * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

 13  * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

 14  * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the

 15  * GNU General Public License for more details.

 16  */

 17 

 18 #include <linux/kernel.h>

 19 #include <linux/fb.h>

 20 #include <linux/msm_mdp.h>

....

[Guest gusthy]

I think the 64mb is for radio. I have seen a few other devices that appear to include radio memory in the quoted total. Does anyone have detailed photos of the circuit board? It would be interesting to see where the chips are located (and also what type of chips they are). The only photos I have seen are the US FCC photos and the detail is very poor.

Where do these numbers come from? By GPU I assume you mean graphics processor, and by FB, frame buffer. Wouldn't they be the same thing? MDP = Mobile Display Processor, so again wouldn't that be the same as GPU and FB? 18MB for a 320x240 display sounds like a lot.

  1 /* drivers/video/msm_fb/mdp.c

  2  *

  3  * MSM MDP Interface (used by framebuffer core)

  4  *

  5  * Copyright (C) 2007 QUALCOMM Incorporated

  6  * Copyright (C) 2007 Google Incorporated

  7  *

  8  * This software is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public

  9  * License version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation, and

 10  * may be copied, distributed, and modified under those terms.

 11  *

 12  * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

 13  * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

 14  * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the

 15  * GNU General Public License for more details.

 16  */

 17 

 18 #include <linux/kernel.h>

 19 #include <linux/fb.h>

 20 #include <linux/msm_mdp.h>

....

But Pulse screen resolution is 320x480, half vga.

[Guest RayT]

even at 1/2 VGA, 320x480 is still only 307K at 16bpp, so why so much.... double buffered would still only take 600+K ??

RayT

[Guest Speckles]

We can experiment with these variables once we have a working Kernel, but as of yet, we only have a half-working one (No drivers).

Where do these numbers come from?

The Kernel, as it boots (via dmesg)

Edited June 29, 2010 by Speckles