Develop Bugs

[Q] Undervolting

Hi, I'm a noob to undervolting here (just rooted and flashed Vanilla Froyo to my Defy a week ago, and I'm hoping to squeeze out as much battery life as I can); just some quick questions about undervolting that I haven't found answers to in other threads:
1) What exactly is "vsel" and how does it relate to the actual battery voltage? For example, even though I've changed the maximum voltage in setvsel and Milestone Overclock (down to about 45 vsel at 800 Mhz so far, haven't tried lower), the battery voltage reported by Spare Parts is still reading between 3800 mV and 4000 mV. Does this mean that setvsel/milestone aren't working or does a ~30% decrease in vsel *not* equal a 30% decrease in battery voltage?
2) If anyone else has undervolted their Defy, can they testify as to what kind of battery life improvements they've gotten? I've heard that custom ROMs are already fairly undervolted

If laptops are anything to go by.. laptops can be undervolted to make them run less hot, thereby extending their life. Though battery life is increased too, this increase is virtually negligible.
Since the limits of undervolting (and over/underclocking), are done on a per-cpu/gpu basis for computers, because they are not all exactly the same and may not work with the same non-default values, I think it's a bad idea to assume that phones will run without problems when using values only tested by people with a phone that is not yours.
If you want to undervolt/over- or underclock, test your device, find out the lowest/highest values and then inrease or decrease that value, to have a safety margin, do not copy someone elses' settings.

A common issue with undervolting on 2.1 (at least with me on 2.1) is that if the minimum clock speed is below 300 mhz, it takes around 3-5 sec to actually respond to incomming call on your defy when defy is on stand-by mode.

Undervolting + Ondemand made my battery work at 23ºC vs +29ºC
I did not wrote down numbers, but battery life increased AT LEAST in 8 hours.
My values
vsel 1; 18 -300
vsel 2; 33 - 600
vsel 3; 43 - 800
(-15 points each value VS factory values)
Removing bloatware, root apps, autostart at boot apps, widgets (they autostart too) etc. or freezing them with "antitek app manager"
Decreased phone memory ussage from 140Mib to 80Mib; Also decreased cpu ussage from 10%-15% average idle to just 1%-5%
Apps / Widgets / Many System preinstalled apps, are autoloaded when phone is turned on, and they run 24/7. waste of resources and app auto killers just aren't good enough, coz apps reload themselves, you have to remove them or freeze them.
fortunely modders are realeasing their custom roms with most of this optimizations

45 vsel
using milestone oc I got 1ghz @ 45vsel from the day I got it I have owned the device for 1 1/2 months now not one single problem but it depends from device to device I must have a bin'd cpu

Lowest vsel

Just curious, what's your lowest vsel?
Mine are currently set as: 18/300 - 33/600 - 39/800.
Sent from my MB525

On 2.1 my 300mhz waz 14 but now im on 2.2 i av to use 16 but heres mine 300/16 600/28 800/39
Sent from my MB525 using XDA App

Running eclair 2.1 blur version 2.21 & my settings are:
300/18
700/32
1100/56
Could probably get the 300 & 700 lower (1100 is at the lowest stable I could set) but I'm happy with what they are.
Up_threshold set to 75%.
Very snappy & good battery life - only uses 4% battery when sleeping over night for 8 hours.

My threshold iz on 99% and i get 3days owt of mine
Sent from my MB525 using XDA App

I have used this for the first time tonight and I'm running the following without any issue
300 / 18
600 / 32
1100 / 56

Mine is 1000/50. I did some testings and it is stable.

sp8y said:
Running eclair 2.1 blur version 2.21 & my settings are:
300/18
700/32
1100/56
Could probably get the 300 & 700 lower (1100 is at the lowest stable I could set) but I'm happy with what they are.
Up_threshold set to 75%.
Very snappy & good battery life - only uses 4% battery when sleeping over night for 8 hours.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Now running the leaked UK 2.2 froyo 3.4.2-117 & I've kept my vsel the same but now have the up_threshold set to 70%.

if i set the lowest vsel, will my battery live longer?

albertocalle said:
if i set the lowest vsel, will my battery live longer?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Less voltage consumption = more use time without needing to charge.
Less charges = Increased lifespan of battery (ussually batteries are rated at 1000 charge cicles)
Less voltage also means less temperature, which may increase lifespan in the long term too.
In climates of 32ºC+ for stores who sell it, its very recommended to store them in refrigerators not in the coolest compartment but next to the drinks.
One battery stored at 10º vs 30º for a few months could mean a lot.
btw my battery lasts at least 12/24 hours more per charge, thanks to setvsel
My settings are
19 300 30 600 40 800
Aply at boot + Limit to vsel1 while screen is off.

In my case:
300/24
600/34
1000/50
At the above voltages, the stability test can run at least 30 minutes with interruptions, like pulling the status menu, showing the instructions etc, from time to time.

What's your battery life like?

For me, with Overclock.. it's EXCELLENT! I can have it in standby but still have background data going (push gmail, twitter apps, etc.) for days at a time and still have some juice left.
Just today with some admittedly light usage (but I did use it) I had battery use time of 12Hrs with over 70% left.
I'm using setvsel @
35 @ 400MHz
50 @ 800MHz
65 @ 1200MHz
CPU Icon is set to refresh every second and it's supposed to cap at Vsel 2 @ 10%. It's as stable as ever.. been running like this for weeks now. I'm taking note of how much I appreciate the excellent battery life I get because my Vibrant has been getting really bad lately.

Running Barebones 1.3 with
19 @ 300Mhz
35 @ 600MHz
52 @ 1000Mhz
Battery Life is excellent - more than 48h without recharging is no problem.

I get 2 days of standby with heavy texting,surfing over wifi,calling and some gaming. DEFY battery performance is one the best amongst all Android phones.

el*Loco said:
Running Barebones 1.3 with
19 @ 300Mhz
35 @ 600MHz
52 @ 1000Mhz
Battery Life is excellent - more than 48h without recharging is no problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Undervolting your cpu can harm your hardware real badly. I've had my defy stopped working and shut down completely in the past so i won't recommend you OC or UV
EDIT: tho i still undervolt but 19 vsel is too low for 300 mhz, raise it upto 26 or so

Yes, 19 vsel maybe too low, at least in my case. When I ran the stability test, anything less than 24 would hang the phone after some 10 minutes. 24 is fine in my case but I set it at 26 to give a little more juice.

LOL. Why the hell, should undervolting harm the cpu? Undervolting improves your cpu's lifetime, instead! Less voltage means less stress (heat) and less leak currents for the cpu.
Well, it's true that you might have some instability issues, when the voltage is too low. As soon as you experience so, you can raise the voltage a little, until you have a stable cpu. I've been using undervolting for my PC's CPUs for several years.
PS: I'm on [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Never had any problems with my settings, some in this forum use even lower voltages.

mine is
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
I use wifi quite a lot. But still the battery backup is ok compared to my previous phones!

Running on Pays 5.0
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
I have to charge every two days.

running on pay 3.1
setvsel:
350/22
700/38
1100/56
48h no problem, record is 80h on moderate use

The battery life on the Defy is absolutely amazing.
I can easily get between 2 and 3 days of normal usage and somewhere in the region of 4-5 if I use it very little.
I reckon if I switched off 3G, had the brightness down as low as possible and generally tried not to use the phone much, I could push a week.
Sadly, my Defy is 'in the shop' just now, damned earpiece.

What do you guys run on the background? I probably able to get 1.5 days on normal usage. Even after charging and no usage, I lose about 10 % after an hour or so.

lanfearxt said:
What do you guys run on the background? I probably able to get 1.5 days on normal usage. Even after charging and no usage, I lose about 10 % after an hour or so.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is impossible to get 1.5 day if defy uses 10% for 1 hour standby. Defy rounds 95% to 100%, and 94% to 90%. So it is possible that an apparent 10% drop is actually a 1% drop. You may install Motocharge to see the battery in 1% increment.

I'm happy to hear everyone getting excellent battery life. The DEFY is a truly unique Android phone.. I'm just afraid that us stateside won't get devices like this because of AT&T... the Bravo is a step below the DEFY just because it doesn't share the same faux-rugged water resistant build. I'm glad T-Mobile picked this one up, overclocked it's only a bit slower than my Vibrant in most operations.

Well I did a Quadrant benchmark 'standoff' with a colleague of mine which has a Samsung Galaxy S [EU version of the Vibrant] and I beat him with over 250 points [the Galaxy S did 975, my Defy did 1334], both running Froyo and the Defy being non-overclocked.
I've also noticed that his Galaxy S tends to hang & stutter from time to time. Regarding battery life, he carries his charger with him at all times, I do not, 'nuff said.
I also get ~1.5days of battery life.

I'm able to squeeze more than 80 hours of usage on a single charge running PaYs 5.0. Light to moderate use of WiFi/Data/GPS/BT, no background syncs and most apps firewalled except through WiFi.
SetVsel:
18/300
32/700
58/1100

ABC_Universal said:
It is impossible to get 1.5 day if defy uses 10% for 1 hour standby. Defy rounds 95% to 100%, and 94% to 90%. So it is possible that an apparent 10% drop is actually a 1% drop. You may install Motocharge to see the battery in 1% increment.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i used circle battery widget and it does shows 1% increments. after 90%, it slows down in terms of usage.
i also forgot to mention that my defy sometime runs pretty hot at 35-38C, which i think accelerates the discharge

what about autobrightness? if is set it on, the battery drains much faster.

For me, with undervolt (800/46;600/30;300/18) I can use my phone to make calls, send sms, surf the web, run some apps, and run one a two games.
After 24h of that usage, I have 50% remaining.

a strange thing happened to me (sorry for my English):
Yesterday I installed the camera 360 that did not work it gave some error. Last night when I went to sleep (1-1.30) had 50% battery, in the morning (7.30-8) phone was dead. I put the phone to recharge, from 11 to 3 o'clock phone has reached 30% of battery so i put the phone to recharge again. Until 10 pm the phone has reached again 30% of battery so I decided to give him a factory reset. With 30% i did 100+ app backups with titanium pro and I gave factory reset, after the phone restore from factory reset surprise the battery show 60% ??? I did restore 100+ app and battery show 50%, I played about a half hour and still 50% battery??? what the hell happened??? 360 camera app has to do with rapid battery discharge???
- I use advance Task Manager droidwall, light <10%, original rom only rooted
- anyway Battery discharge I think is caused by the signal GSM of my operator's.
- anyway in the night i decided to kill the traffic and by that the battery shouldn't discharged hardly over night. right?
(Q) sometimes the touch screen it freezes in games so I have to put the phone in standby and come out of standby, and then the touch screen works again ... this happens to you to?

Underclocking and Battery life?

hi,
I am running stock jellybean with franco kernel. just wondering what is the optimal CPU setup that doesnt sacrifice too much performance while increasing battery life. Im not too concerned about games as I rarely play them. I ussualy use the phone for music, calls, text, email, and webbrowsing.
I am using the Franco updater app. I have 1228 max, 230 min
and screen off max is 384.
I also noticed in cpu spy that my highest two frequencies 1036, 1228 are combined less than 10%.
with all that information, what do you suggest?

hshaikh said:
hi,
I am running stock jellybean with franco kernel. just wondering what is the optimal CPU setup that doesnt sacrifice too much performance while increasing battery life. Im not too concerned about games as I rarely play them. I ussualy use the phone for music, calls, text, email, and webbrowsing.
I am using the Franco updater app. I have 1228 max, 230 min
and screen off max is 384.
I also noticed in cpu spy that my highest two frequencies 1036, 1228 are combined less than 10%.
with all that information, what do you suggest?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I suggest to decrease your max CPU until you feel it affects performance too much. You can also try switching to a governor less aggressive than interactive (try ondemand).
Don't expect magic though. I've played with decreasing max CPU clock, max CPU screen off, governor settings etc with three different kernels. Gathered stats for at least one week each time. Never noticed a difference large enough to actually matter to me. For maximizing battery life, you can gain more by hunting apps that cause a lot of (partial) wakelocks and alarms, and use low screen brightness.

hshaikh said:
and screen off max is 384.
with all that information, what do you suggest?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
don't limit screen off cpu speed to 384. it will take longer to perform operations under wakelock, thus killing of more battery than it actually saves.
it would be nice if listening to music, since it's not an intensive task and it requires constant cpu usage. still, you'll most likely have stuff syncing in the background so i don't think you're doing any good by limiting it to 384 on screen off.

power isnt going to be conserved with lower clock speed. lower clock speed means it takes longer to finish the task. to conserve power, your phone has to do less. for example, lower brightness, no sound, less/no syncing.

Darunion said:
power isnt going to be conserved with lower clock speed. lower clock speed means it takes longer to finish the task. to conserve power, your phone has to do less. for example, lower brightness, no sound, less/no syncing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, there is an optimum somewhere. Higher CPU speed means tasks are executed more quickly, but higher clock speeds also draw more current from the battery. I agree that tweaking this has little effect on battery life though.

Petrovski80 said:
Well, there is an optimum somewhere. Higher CPU speed means tasks are executed more quickly, but higher clock speeds also draw more current from the battery. I agree that tweaking this has little effect on battery life though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you are correct. there is a magic middle ground because power consumption doesnt scale in a linear way. but finding that spot would take massive testing and even getting to the center, would still probably only gain about 10-15mins average use on a battery charge :/

bk201doesntexist said:
don't limit screen off cpu speed to 384. it will take longer to perform operations under wakelock, thus killing of more battery than it actually saves.
it would be nice if listening to music, since it's not an intensive task and it requires constant cpu usage. still, you'll most likely have stuff syncing in the background so i don't think you're doing any good by limiting it to 384 on screen off.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
what speed show i set to max when screen is off.

did you read anything that Darunion and Petrovski80 wrote? I keep mine at it's max, i don't care, i don't live in the woods with no electricity.

thanks for your inputs. i have experimented and I found out that changing the cpu speeds has minimal effect of battery life. the clock speed is not killing the battery the screen is. no matter what cpu settings i use i get 3-4 hours screen on time.
if i dont use the phone alot that day (like 1 hour screen on time) the battery will still be 40% after a day.

hshaikh said:
thanks for your inputs. i have experimented and I found out that changing the cpu speeds has minimal effect of battery life. the clock speed is not killing the battery the screen is. no matter what cpu settings i use i get 3-4 hours screen on time.
if i dont use the phone alot that day (like 1 hour screen on time) the battery will still be 40% after a day.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Exactly. I get similar performance.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Battery last nothing, insane drain

I need help with the kernel auditor to get better battery life, i have installed last cm nighties nad last NJ2 band, i read that if u change the kernel you can get better battery stats, the battery drop really fast, with low brightness and wi-fi off, just LTE data, without GPS. I use the app called "Root Booster" and the Calibrate Battery but it's the same. I need help with the kernels.
Sorry for the bad english, is not my native lenguage
B

My goto settings on this phone were interactive governor with the following tunables tweaked:
hispeed_freq = 918000
min_sample_time = 50000
timer_rate = 30000
Row I/O scheduler with 1024 kb read ahead.
Good battery life and not awful performance.
However, tweaking the kernel is unlikely to get you a miraculous change in battery life. Chances are if you're battery is draining super fast you have some rogue app or process keeping your phone from getting into deep sleep. You can troubleshoot that with better battery stats.

jason2678 said:
My goto settings on this phone were interactive governor with the following tunables tweaked:
hispeed_freq = 918000
min_sample_time = 50000
timer_rate = 30000
Row I/O scheduler with 1024 kb read ahead.
Good battery life and not awful performance.
However, tweaking the kernel is unlikely to get you a miraculous change in battery life. Chances are if you're battery is draining super fast you have some rogue app or process keeping your phone from getting into deep sleep. You can troubleshoot that with better battery stats.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Explain me more about "gettin into deep sleep"

Your phone's CPUs will scale up and down under load, but they will always run at some minimum frequency even under low load if they are "awake". I think it was around 300 MHz minimum on the i747.
In deep sleep the CPU powers off entirely, and your phone goes into a very low power draw mode. It is still listening for calls, texts, etc., but drawing much less power than if it was awake.
Your phone should be trying to get into deep sleep any time the screen is off, but wakelocks can prevent it. Not all wakelocks are bad. You don't want your phone switching into deep sleep if you're playing music or downloading files with the screen off; however, some wakelocks are unnecessary. Low priority apps syncing excessively or some app or process going rogue and holding a wakelock when it serves no purpose are not entirely uncommon. The kernel holds wakelocks and therefore sometimes catches the blame, but rarely is the kernel actually the culprit for excessive wakelocks. The kernel is typically just doing what the higher level software like the android system or apps are telling it to do.
One good indication the i747 was suffering from wakelocks was if it felt warm to the touch even after sitting with the screen off for an hour or two. This phone always heated some during use, but it should be room temp / cool to the touch after a long time idle. Since lollipop I don't find android's battery menu in settings to be all that useful. The better battery stats app I linked to in the post above is a great tool for investigating wakelocks. It will let you know what % of the time your phone is in deep sleep, and what is keeping it awake; a much more analytical approach than the "is it warm when it should be cool" method.

jason2678 said:
Your phone's CPUs will scale up and down under load, but they will always run at some minimum frequency even under low load if they are "awake". I think it was around 300 MHz minimum on the i747.
In deep sleep the CPU powers off entirely, and your phone goes into a very low power draw mode. It is still listening for calls, texts, etc., but drawing much less power than if it was awake.
Your phone should be trying to get into deep sleep any time the screen is off, but wakelocks can prevent it. Not all wakelocks are bad. You don't want your phone switching into deep sleep if you're playing music or downloading files with the screen off; however, some wakelocks are unnecessary. Low priority apps syncing excessively or some app or process going rogue and holding a wakelock when it serves no purpose are not entirely uncommon. The kernel holds wakelocks and therefore sometimes catches the blame, but rarely is the kernel actually the culprit for excessive wakelocks. The kernel is typically just doing what the higher level software like the android system or apps are telling it to do.
One good indication the i747 was suffering from wakelocks was if it felt warm to the touch even after sitting with the screen off for an hour or two. This phone always heated some during use, but it should be room temp / cool to the touch after a long time idle. Since lollipop I don't find android's battery menu in settings to be all that useful. The better battery stats app I linked to in the post above is a great tool for investigating wakelocks. It will let you know what % of the time your phone is in deep sleep, and what is keeping it awake; a much more analytical approach than the "is it warm when it should be cool" method.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Perfect answer, that give me a lot of info i dont know about it, thanks a lot dude i will use the app and check what is the problem here!