# Linaro project optimisation



## dezz

Did anyone considered introducing linaro optimization into aokp?

http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/06/03/linaro-android-puts-stock-android-to-shame-on-ti-pandaboard-omap4430/

Project page
http://www.linaro.org/

From what I understand CM guys are already working on it..


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## winner00

Who cares who implements it first?


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## majort94

i think he just wants it fast since it seems incredibly usefull


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## dezz

I actually don't care who does first..

I would love to see it being implemented at all..

What i meant to ask was: can aokp team implement it themselves or have to wait for CM to do it first?

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


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## Harrison_W1337

It would be great if it was implemented. But I agree who cares who gets it first.


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## dezz

OK, so from what gather from replies it seems that it is to complicated and they can't do on their own. We'll have to wait for CM team to implement it first and AOKP will follow..

Still good news


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## Zaphod-Beeblebrox

dezz said:


> OK, so from what gather from replies it seems that it is to complicated and they can't do on their own. We'll have to wait for CM team to implement it first and AOKP will follow..
> 
> Still good news


You got that from the replies above?


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## dezz

I don't think anything even close to an answer found it's way into any of the posts above.. I could be wrong.

Are you saying it is not so?

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


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## Zaphod-Beeblebrox

dezz said:


> I don't think anything even close to an answer found it's way into any of the posts above.. I could be wrong.
> 
> Are you saying it is not so?
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


No, you are right. There was no indication of anything in any of those replies. Which is why I don't see where you got that it would be too complicated, and we'll just wait for CM?

I only briefly looked at the link, and it definitely looks interesting. I have no idea how complicated it would be. Might be pretty easy to implement. But there is a long list of things we would like to do, and only so many of us to do it


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## asianrage

I would like to see AOKP integrate the Linaro optimizations before we see new features. It's like choosing between performance mods or appearance mods. There has to be a balance, right?


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## majort94

i see where you are coming from, but you are only one person.

maybe get a poll started explaining what and why you want it, and have that as a different thread.
then maybe the developers will decide to look into it. They aren't going to do it just because three people want it.


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## poontab

Thread cleaned.

Guys keep your posts respectful or you won't be permitted to post at all. If you see something that may need staff attention do not address it yourself. Instead use the report button & we will look into it.


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## dezz

Latest news on the subject:​​​​
...The best part though: the parts of Linaro that make is so efficient and fast are coming soon to Cyanogenmod 9.​​​​Basically, parts of the Linaro code have been submitted to the CM9 gerrit and are currently awaiting approval. Once commited, these tweaks will be added to the main CM9 code, giving all supported devices a drastic increase in performance.​​​​The good news doesn't end there, though: Galaxy Nexus owners can already take an unofficial CM9 build with the Linaro bits for a whirl. From what we've read, this build is noticeably faster and more fluid right out of the gate.​​​​READ HERE​​​​


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## mad96

You guys should check this out, I'm not sure how much impact this could have on the thunderbolt because of the topic of 4.0.4 but still its extremely impressive.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/06/09/linaro-android-nearly-doubles-ics-performance-and-now-parts-of-it-are-being-added-to-cm9/ 
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk 2


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## GSUS969

You guys should check this out. It would be interesting to see if developers can implement these changes into ROMS.

http://www.androidpo...g-added-to-cm9/


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## tbolt81

GSUS969 said:


> You guys should check this out. It would be interesting to see if developers can implement these changes into ROMS.
> 
> http://www.androidpo...g-added-to-cm9/


there is already check out xda, they have linaro cm9 build up. I'm currently running it with imos 3.9 linaro. Check it out!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


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## BootAnimator

Running it now too. 
I don't know about real world use being 100% faster, but it is a noticeable improvement so far with the changes made as of the unofficial build of CM


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## vcapezio

tbolt81 said:


> there is already check out xda, they have linaro cm9 build up. I'm currently running it with imos 3.9 linaro. Check it out!
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


What do you think about it while running Imo's kernel with the Linaro toolchain? Smoother scrolling and opening apps, etc.?


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## nexgeezus

BootAnimator said:


> Running it now too.
> I don't know about real world use being 100% faster, but it is a noticeable improvement so far with the changes made as of the unofficial build of CM


Linky? Please

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


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## miketoasty

nexgeezus said:


> Linky? Please
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


Here you go: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1700442

Not to be an ass but it literally was like a two second Google search to find it.


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## WhataSpaz

Benchmark wise, it's pretty sweet but how's real life performance? lol


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## nexgeezus

miketoasty said:


> Here you go: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1700442
> 
> Not to be an ass but it literally was like a two second Google search to find it.


Thanks...... ass. Lol

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


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## billymaloney3

miketoasty said:


> Here you go: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1700442
> 
> Not to be an ass but it literally was like a two second Google search to find it.


 +1 I typed in linaro cm and it was like the first link lol

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


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## BurningShdw

Had a better benchmark on bamf than I did with linaro cm9...linaro scored around 4300 while paradigm scores 5500...ish

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


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## Hellboy

Yeah its impressive but my question is how much heat does this speed up create?

Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk 2


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## brainfire

dezz said:


> Wanted to see what all the hubub was about. I'm home til next Friday,
> as the wife just gave birth to our daughter Thursday afternoon, I'll mess
> with it while I'm home


Just dirty flashed it. Works OK, but don't see the big deal


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## ashclepdia

Did you guys see that imoseyon latest kernel builds are using linaro toolchain?

In case anyone wanted to check it out and didn't know 
(i know people don't go crazy about bench results, but on the kernel that use linaro toolchain smartbench 2012 showed a pretty nice jump for me on productivity index...take it as you will  )

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


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## cheez99

I've used an unofficial build with Linaro optimizations and I'm generally very skeptical of anything that says it's faster. It was genuinely much snappier right out of the box. Right after the ROM had booted, apps were launching very quickly. No stuttering or lag issues that you occasionally get when things are loading. I'd say responsiveness of the ROM overall feels 30%-50% improved.

Once I got all of my apps restored, I noticed that everything loaded faster. Just much more responsive overall. One big improvement I noticed was how much quicker I was able to change albums on Poweramp. This is generally something that causes a good amount of lag and I was just able to switch albums one after another without so much as a stutter.


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## Jarhezion

I also noticed a speed improvement, I switched from the official cm9 nightly. The linaro patched version seems to be eating my battery life pretty fast. Using it with imos latest stable kernel. Anyone else getting the same results?


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## i4mt3hwin

I feel like most people are gigantically overstating the performance increase on this thing. I installed one of the builds of it and I didn't notice a difference in speed over the average fresh reinstall of a rom. Furthermore, there are posts over at reddit android with actual numbers in benchmarks and most of the speed increases are within margin of error, in some cases the new build performs slower than the latest CM nightly.


__
https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyNexus/comments/usos8

So yeah this nice and the changes should be included, but it's definitely not drastically increasing the speed of anything. I just think some of you haven't installed a clean rom recently.


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## amplified

cheez99 said:


> I've used an unofficial build with Linaro optimizations and I'm generally very skeptical of anything that says it's faster. It was genuinely much snappier right out of the box. Right after the ROM had booted, apps were launching very quickly. No stuttering or lag issues that you occasionally get when things are loading. I'd say responsiveness of the ROM overall feels 30%-50% improved.
> 
> Once I got all of my apps restored, I noticed that everything loaded faster. Just much more responsive overall. One big improvement I noticed was how much quicker I was able to change albums on Poweramp. This is generally something that causes a good amount of lag and I was just able to switch albums one after another without so much as a stutter.


Im amazed. This post made me miss the nexus









Over it though









Sent from my GT-I9300 using RootzWiki


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## Drunkdirishman

The title is misleading, should say 100% faster.


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## mad96

Your right but heat and speed issues are cool but I think they are talking how fast its actually goin to make a difference during compiling,

Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk 2


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## liveEvil

linaro is clearly unleashing the funroll-loops in us all.


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## quickdraw86

interesting read, thanks for the post.

Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk 2


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## cheez99

i4mt3hwin said:


> I feel like most people are gigantically overstating the performance increase on this thing. I installed one of the builds of it and I didn't notice a difference in speed over the average fresh reinstall of a rom. Furthermore, there are posts over at reddit android with actual numbers in benchmarks and most of the speed increases are within margin of error, in some cases the new build performs slower than the latest CM nightly.
> 
> http://www.reddit.co...or_vzw_and_gsm/
> 
> So yeah this nice and the changes should be included, but it's definitely not drastically increasing the speed of anything. I just think some of you haven't installed a clean rom recently.


This isn't Windows we're talking about here and I have installed clean ROMs recently. In fact, I installed CM9 and the CM9 Linaro build within two days of each other. The Linaro build was much more responsive right after the flash and a few hours later after I installed all of my apps. I'm talking real word useage here, not benchmarks. It's much quicker to transition between screens and applications. That's about it, really.


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## ygvuhb

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/06/09/linaro-android-nearly-doubles-ics-performance-and-now-parts-of-it-are-being-added-to-cm9/








> News started to trickle out this week about a new Android build called _Linaro_. Basically, it takes stock Android 4.0.4 and makes it super-fast, and super-awesome(er). In fact, it can boost performance by up to 100 percent over stock.


http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2012/06/07/using-ds-5-on-galaxy-nexus-running-aosp-4-0-4/



> I have packaged a boot.img which is based on AOSP 4.0.4 release(android-4.0.4_r1.2). I won't get into the details of compiling the module and binary. You can look at linaro's integration of DS-5 on the boards. It is very similar to that. Maybe I will post if someone needs the instructions.The boot image has the kernel compiled with necessary configs for gator and I have also included the gator daemon and module in the image. The init script takes care of loading and running the daemon.
> Download the boot image from here:
> http://people.linaro.org/~vishalbhoj/boot_gator.img
> You will need an unlocked galaxy nexus running AOSP 4.0.4.


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## darkpark

I suspect that once the cm guys tweak it or smooth out the whole rom for the GN than things/performance will hopefully improve. 
the developer that's showing the demo does mention that it's all done on the cpu. perhaps when they tweak to take advantage of the gpu too than things improve even more.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2


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## zvogt

From my perspective it all seems mostly academic. I'm running AOKPCB R2 and a recent exp Imoseyon kernel on my Nexus. I installed the benchmarking app from here: http://code.google.com/p/0xbench/downloads/list/ and I'm already getting better numbers than were shown in that video. It doesn't seem like there is really that much more room for significant improvement on this hardware. While I agree the optimizations would be nice to have, I highly doubt the average AOKP user is going to notice any real life difference.


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## yarly

I'm mostly skeptical of it their claims for now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4089218



> saurik 12 hours ago | link
> 
> Everyone is saying "nothing", but I reviewed the patches (I did /not/ bother watching the video, however, as it was long and I was in a place where I felt uncomfortable playing sound; so maybe the video says "we didn't do anything" ;P), and what they did is to remove all of the non-strict pointer aliasing (one of C's optimization weaknesses) and thereby were able to kick the optimizer up to -O3, which is helping some already tightly-coded algorithms actually avoid touching memory.





> edderly 16 hours ago | link
> 
> It's not double the performance. It's a demo that if you use the software GLES implementation (which isn't used in production) they can run that benchmark at 60fps. The non-linaro toolchain GLES renders at less that 60 fps for this benchmark and then degrades to 30fps because the setup is double buffered and vsync'd.


Don't to keep quoting (just click the link above), but the guys on that site generally know what they're talking about (it's a discussion site with mostly developers).


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## quickdraw86

I've read that there are builds of cm9 available for the gnex now that are using portions of the linaro code, I wonder if there are users of those roms that can offer feedback?

Sent from a highly tweaked and personalized Thunderbolt 4G!


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## yarly

quickdraw86 said:


> I've read that there are builds of cm9 available for the gnex now that are using portions of the linaro code, I wonder if there are users of those roms that can offer feedback?
> 
> Sent from a highly tweaked and personalized Thunderbolt 4G!


I use CM9 on my Nexus, doesn't really make a difference to me. Been using cm9 since January to now on it. Linaro doesn't help with most things in real applications either. Any of the realistic benchmarks for it only show a slight improvement with CPU based things. On Android 4.0, it's using GPU rendering for nearly everything. A few things might load faster, but the CPU isn't the bottleneck or performance indicator it used to be. The GPU matters much more and the Nexus kind of has a weaker GPU in it (same one that is in the bionic). Most phones aren't using bleeding edge GPUs though. The Galaxy S3 is still using the same GPU that was in the S2. Not that it was a bad GPU and it's still nearly better than everything out there.


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## quickdraw86

yarly said:


> I use CM9 on my Nexus, doesn't really make a difference to me. Been using cm9 since January to now on it. Linaro doesn't help with most things in real applications either. Any of the realistic benchmarks for it only show a slight improvement with CPU based things. On Android 4.0, it's using GPU rendering for nearly everything. A few things might load faster, but the CPU isn't the bottleneck or performance indicator it used to be. The GPU matters much more and the Nexus kind of has a weaker GPU in it (same one that is in the bionic). Most phones aren't using bleeding edge GPUs though. The Galaxy S3 is still using the same GPU that was in the S2. Not that it was a bad GPU and it's still nearly better than everything out there.


Thanks for the feedback, and that's a great explanation as well. I really questioned claims of 30- 100% performance improvement and knew that a real user's experiences would be more realistic.

Sent from a highly tweaked and personalized Thunderbolt 4G!


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## droidmakespwn

As has been said before quadrant scores mean next to nothing but the real world usage of this is awesome. I've noticed lots of little things have disappeared such as stuttering when scrolling and app transitioning. Apps like Facebook have absolutely no stutter any more and (possibly a placebo thing) but I feel like my 3g speeds are better.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Edit: not to mention I just checked my battery stats and I got over 3.5 hr screen on time without even trying to boost battery in any way.


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## yarly

Yeah I wouldn't say adding what linario did is a bad thing, it's just over sensationalized and their benchmarks were very narrow and set for conditions that just don't really apply to Nexus or any other phone. It improved the robustness of the CPU a bit depending on what kind of process it's doing, but it's not something where anyone would ever say, "Wow my phone feels like it's 100x faster







"


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## Hellboy

Thanks the the explanation Yarly. I sure dont know all that techno lingo. lol


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## yarly

Hellboy said:


> Thanks the the explanation Yarly. I sure dont know all that techno lingo. lol


Sure, np.

If anyone didn't see it, there were some benchmarks shown here comparing vanilla CM9 to the Linaro version

Some of the CPU tasks showed noticeable improvement, some were iffy as to if it was improved or just variance and some shown nothing (like any of the GPU related tasks shown under frames per second (fps) ). It could be too early to tell if everything is merged in as well. I haven't looked at the CM gerrit in a few days to see if there was anything else added recently from Linario. I would love for it to improve Android a million times over, but even a little bit is still something. I don't think a lot of the issues will go away on Android until they ditch Java, if they ever do. The virtual machine on Android (Dalvik) still has room for improvement (versus the Sun/Oracle virtual machine on everything else) and it's gotten a lot better with ICS (I'm sure it'll even be noticeable on the Thunderbolt).

I still get the momentary "pause" on loading the active applications with the task switcher button on the Nexus, which is the one thing I always notice for lag. I think that's more of just an issue with Android using Java than anything else, sadly. I still get lag in the Swing/Java based IDE I use on my PC (compared to a natvely build IDE like Visual Studio) and my PC is a core i7 with 4 cores. The task switcher list on ICS is also a mostly CPU bound task outside of the animations to render it.


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## Hellboy

Yeah looking at that link not much showed drastic improvement on it. Plus CM9 is still fairly new and still I guess has a lot of tweaking to do on it. I was wondering how would this work on GB for like the bolt and other phones. Where roms has basically been modified as much as they can. Could this linaro be implemented in to a GB rom (Sense or AOSP)? Might show improvements better or will this only work with ICS?


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## yarly

Can't really say offhand how much work it would take to backport it to gingerbread. I would guess (and only a guess as I haven't looked that deep into Linario from the code level past what I've seen on the CM gerrit and discussions from others who have) it would take less time than currently forward porting the TB RIL to ICS. One would just need a developer with the will to do it.

If I had a working TB still, I would probably be working on the RIL when I'm bored, but haven't gotten to fixing mine yet. Going offtopic here, but even if one took the obvious route for the RIL and worked with porting it from the Rezound ICS leak, I'm not sure how compatible they really are on the software level (despite having the same modem hardware). I know the Rezound will report certain things signal wise on GB that the TB won't and even more so on ICS, so that's not an overly good sign as it had to be doing that in lower levels of the software (c/c++ binary land) that aren't as easy to mod.


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## monster4




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## zvogt

There are already multiple threads for this topic. There is even already a preliminary build with some of these enhancements:
http://rootzwiki.com/topic/19302-aokp-toro-june-4-build-38-404/page__st__8810#entry730757


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## dezz

So why not just add the GPU optimization in the very same way as linaro for CPU?


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## majort94

IT IS HERE!!!

in case you didnt know...
http://rootzwiki.com/topic/27433-aokp-38-linaro/

I am installing in one minute


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## yarly

dezz said:


> So why not just add the GPU optimization in the very same way as linaro for CPU?


If it were that simple, then they would of course.

1) Most GPU drivers are closed source, with the exception of ones like Andreno Drivers (qualcomm)

2) GPUs do not function in the same way as a CPU. The optimizations done by linario were mostly in the compiler to the source and disabling a few things that are checked when compiling in the programming languages of the source.

3) Other various reasons that take too long to explain when you're probably just looking for a casual/general explanation as to why.


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