EDIT3: this is NOT an overclock! Manually setting a scaling governor does not forcibly increase the intended frequency range of the CPU clock! Setting the scaling governor has more to do with performance management. In my case, setting it to “performance”, it simply forces the cpu to always run at the maximum frequency as designed by the manufacturer. Further reading here and here. Thank you @[email protected] for the reminder!
EDIT2: the tablet is rooted with Magisk ( https://topjohnwu.github.io/Magisk/install.html ) and Termux is running with superuser privileges granted through Magisk. The below command was issued after su - ing into a root shell. “performance” was echo ed into all available /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/.../scaling_governors, meaning, there are several subdirectories called policy[0...] in which the scaling_governor files reside.
EDIT: echo ing “performance” to /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_governor seems to have maxed out the cpu clockspeed! Now the tablet is snappy as hell! It’ll be interesting to see how battery drain and heat are affected by this. Thank you @[email protected] !
Say, by sending some value to something inside /sys/.../cpu or the likes. I have already aggressively debloated the tablet, but I like to experiment and I am not afraid to destroy the tablet since I bought it for 150 bucks at sale. Or pehaps there is some Magisk module that can do this?
The tablet is a Samsung Galaxy A9+.
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Interesting. I’m sure heat and battery life are noticeably affected. If not very noticeably, I think significantly anyhow I recently got some Galaxy Note 10" 2014 units, and I am trying to get the very best out of it. I hadn’t even known about them. The early Galaxy Note phones were terrific, but still a phone size. Then there are the Galaxy Tab models which basically deals with the size issue but not really designed specifically for what I wanted. This thing is just a very enlarged Note 4. On a couple of them, I put TWRP and custom ROM, while on one of them I kept the stock ROM with its last update, bringing it to Android 5.x. It runs the old school Adobe PS Touch, Snapseed, Sketchbook, S-Note, and a handful of other graphics apps. They all run beautifully and it’s my almost-perfect art device. Rooted and debloated, of course. I’m gonna see how these modified units do on eBay.
I think my long-winded rambling point is that rather than kill your battery and possibly cause severe wear on your device, maybe find one that can use a custom ROM, or at least Root and optimizing by shutting off tons of bloat.
What’s your use case for doing this.
I like to experiment
and it has an awfully bad CPU that lags from time to time, but first and foremost
I like to experiment
Usually (on laptops anyway) setting the performance governor only marginally increases throughput and/or latency, while significantly increasing power use. This is because the default behavior of ondemand governor is, almost always, to go to max clock speed practically instantly when there’s actual work to do.
In theory it can even have detrimental effect, especially with passive/inadequate cooling (which I assume an Android tablet would have), because the CPU will throttle automatically if it gets too warm, and disabling power saving features means it’ll run generally hotter.
Thank you for this insight! Before setting the scaling governor, I did some initial testing that showed exactly what you’re saying: whenever I switched windows, fired up another app, wrote to a file - really whatever I tried - the frequencies maxed out. Maybe, what felt marginally snappier was the result of the CPU not having to jump between frequencies? I have zero knowledge on how CPUs work with power… 😅
Yeah could be. There’s some latency for sure, the question is whether it’s noticeable. Definitely hard to tell subjectively, and as far as I know, also hard to measure without special equipment. I just think it’s probably not worth it to use the performance governor, even for (say) a laptop connected to a power supply, just because of the extra heat, fan noise, or the potentially earlier throttling. But I guess you have to judge that for yourself.
Not on stock ROM. IIRC back when I was messing with that kind of thing, you needed a custom kernel.
Thanks! I’ll go on and check if there is anything precompiled out there.
You simply disabled the power management.
Which resulted in what I was aiming for. There are other available scaling governors that yield different frequencies.
As dose most PC over clocking practically. It is just allowing chips to run at higher temps by removing the limitations on power designed to keep them managed.
Mobiles may be more strict. Due to battery life. But all over locking is considering the compremises and adjusting the priority.
With smart phones. The compromise is normally battery life rather then heat.
Desktops it’s adding extra cooling and shortening the design lifetime of chips in exchange for Greater CPU cycles.
I’m surprised that worked since Termux has so many permissions and process # limits and stuff on stock Android. Is it permanent? Semi-permanent if you avoid losing ADB/Shizuku with restart?
EDIT: I’m running stock Android rooted with Magisk. OneUI 7, Android 15, Kernel 5.4.249
I haven’t tried rebooting yet, but I’m pretty sure it resets on reboot. Also, my only evidence that it worked is what cpuinfo_cur_freq reports, and because of how Android seems to works with its virtual filesystems and Termux only being a virtual terminal, I’m actually unsure of how to measure the true frequencies in any other way. Here are two screenshots anyway. 1804800 is the maximum available frequency.
Well keep everyone posted! I’ve got some old stock Android devices I’d love to fuck around with more but having to intervene with all of them is a tremendous boner killer
Thanks, i’ll try this on my anemic E-reader (Kobo Boox Leaf). It’s a bit painful to run, barely fast enough to not timeout Kotatsu (Manga).
But needs to be done each reboot.
I had no idea e-readers can do manga 😱😍 maybe I should get one, after all 😁
probably needs to be done after reboot and probably drains battery more than otherwise, but I have not done any testing as of yet. I sat at a café and played around with it for two hours, during which I couldn’t really notice any difference in power draw since the battery capacity is huge. Keep checking the OP, since I might update after some testing.
Yeah, most just run a Android with reader-centric launcher and some of the Kobo devices have even LineageOS support. But like stated; they are barely powerful enough to run the launcher fluidly. And battery life sucks for a E-reader. Honestly, nowadays i would go with a Tablet and/or a PocketBook; they at least run a optimized Linux.
About my setup: all animations disabled in developer options, launcher inkOS, apps like Kotatsu, Myne, Librery and Book Reader from F-Droid Classic. And Cromite with the setting to display a context menu on link, for those old.reddit stories.
I’ve gone with “Performance Tweaker” from apkmirror now, this helps a bit, have Magisk anyway. Tracking disabled via App Manager.Cool! I had little to now knowledge on e-readers… Wanting to buy one, and realizing how expensive they are, is what made me go for the Galaxy Tab A9+. It was about 150 bucks, on sale. I don’t regret it.
I hope tweaking the scaling governor helps you some, but as I have stated in the various updates in the OP, it has its quirks…
