[FUTURE APP] Overclocking/Undervolting stability test & power efficiency optimizer
Hi !
Here is the description of a potential app that might be developed under an open source license by united developers.
The app has several intents we may discuss:
1/ Validate the CPU stability
- Rare defective devices are not stable with manufacturer's Frequency, voltage and governor configuration.
- With overclocked devices, stability is far more challenging and as difficult to verify.
CPU stability is influenced by a lot of parameters, like
- Frequency table
- Voltage table
- Governor used
- Quality of the voltage regulation & switching implementation (hardware and software)
- Environmental heat, by other components (GPU, battery, screen) or the external temperature especially with black devices under the sun.
2/ Validate the GPU stability
Same thing here, most of our devices GPU can be overclocked but so far there is no good tool to validate its stability.
3/ Validate the system stability
Torture test: CPU + GPU + screen at 100% stability & charging at the same time
This is quite a common scenario when phone or tablets are used as gaming devices.
4/ Provide help to optimize the power efficiency
Today many OC users tend also to reduce the power efficiency of their device by setting inappropriate minimal and maximal frequencies (reduces efficiency) or by configuring too high voltages.
The best OC in general, or at least the most energy efficient consist of increasing the frequencies without changing the voltages.
Even if a higher frequency increases the power envelope, it only improve the power efficiency.
Also, undervolting for reduced frequency / power energy states improve power efficiency.
Future: automatic OC optimizer with profiles
Profiles:
- Best power efficiency without overclocking (undervolting only)
- Best power efficiency
- Balanced
- Max performance
With this feature, It could become the master of every OC tool.
Of course it will require the ability to speak to each existing sysfs controls formats, which is not such a big deal as most are quite cleanly implemented!
However it would make a few apps obsolete & also few people mad, which is definitely a negative point.
Another idea for this optimizer could be to allow for other OC apps to use the stability test engine and do the optimization themselves.
Implementation details
Good old stability stability test traditionally has been trying to make your CPU hot. As hot as possible, consume the most power, see if it crashes, and that's pretty much all.
While this approach could work with old PC CPU, it's now totally outdated.
Even if an excess of heat is still capable of making a CPU crash, modern CPU have quite complex usage behaviors like
- Switching Frequency and Voltage all the time.
- Entering and leaving sleep over and over, each time you lock/unlock your device, of the baseband wake it up by receiving a message, etc.
Like in every low level hardware stuff, the most delicate operations are switch of states, so, what a stress-test needs to do contains:
For me the reference test is "Intel Linpack" x86 implementation like you see in IntelBurnTest. I heard linpack binary is what they use in factory to determine which is the frequency rating of each CPU.
I don't know if it's true but I've always been impressed by the short time needed to detect an unstable PC system reliably where other tools like "prime95" could run for hours without giving usable result.
The ability to let the CPU (or GPU) switch frequencies
It can be done:
- by varying the CPU load. CPU governor will do its thing all alone.
- by "force" modifying the CPU frequency directly
Let the device enter sleep and wake it up
Many OC devices seems to work well but suffer from "sleep of death" issue. IE never wake up.
Sometimes even non-OC device have the same problem if you use ondemand governor instead of conservative.
I guess this is definitely something that can be implemented in the stability test
Detect non-fatal calculation errors
Like Intel Linpack test, errors detecting before a crash is smart and much safer.
It also allow to reduce dramatically the required test run time.
Existing apps
@SnakeHaveYou told me about the existing app named StabilityTest.
In the description the implementation looks very good, with the ability to detect non-crashing calculation errors.
However after about 20 minutes of test at a known unstable frequency on my phone, I get no error.
However if I keep the same OC'ed frequency, starting an OpenGL game, or let the phone enter sleep and waking it up a bit later leads to an unrecoverable freeze.
So, this app looks good but its implementation seems to lack the full stress ability required to simulate a real usage pattern.
Who
After running the app idea on twitter, several developers showed interest in the idea.
I have no plan to write or promote this application by myself.
However I'm interested into acting as a host, incubator or something like that, and also contributor.
Who showed interest right away (developers)
@bvalosek
@BFGarzilla9k
@ytt3r
@ogdobber
@KhasMek
@TheEscapist_xda
And also a few people before the the the idea was described publicly.
I guess this app can have a very large user base quite fast, especially since it will be promoted by about every kernel developer here on XDA.
How
I propose a shared git repository on https://github.com/project-voodoo with plenty of contributors with write access to the App SDK & NDK code.
Maybe forks all over the place could do also, but if it enhance freedom I'm not sure it would favor collaboration so much
Hey, your turn guys!
This would be extremely useful. Hope it goes well!
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using Tapatalk
This is a really cool idea. I know enough XML to work on the UI, so I guess if I want to be involved, thats the way in
I won't be much help this week though.
nice posts bud-- good to see you starting the ball rolling from your idea on Twitter earlier. Just some quick info before I head out... more tonight probably
Some thoughts on the app:
the changing of states is definitely a huge thing to work into the tests, as this is where some of the more subtle problems between the voltage/freq steps seems to manifest themselves.
I have yet to find a synthetic test that can fail/detect problems as quickly as say launching a game like Cordy.., so there are ways to bash the system harder than the current tests it seems
what i can bring to the table
No experience with the NDK but pretty solid C experience for embedded systems
Can probably help the most on UI/metrics/feedback parts of the app. Creating views to reflect test status, sysfs state info, etc. Example of an app that shows time_in_state info i wrote a few weekends ago -> CPU Spy
my dev environment
Arch Linux
vim + android SDK command line tools
git for VCS (github for the few opensource projects I've done)
I'll be watching this thread to see what sort of dev activity we have going on over the next few days... looking forward to working with some of yall fellow XDA guys
Do you have a twitter? It would be good if you made one for collaboration
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ytt3r said:
Do you have a twitter? It would be good if you made one for collaboration
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
@bvalosek
I agree with supercurio on the Linpack, detecting errors part. My idea was something like Prime95. Have an array of known primes, first 1000, lets say, then start generating the first 1000 primes. After each division(inner loop), change the frequency max and min level to a random step. If the generated prime number ever fails the comparison to the known primes, you are unstable. Since a lot of the instability in mobile oc comes from the voltage switching, the frequency switching would stress that as well.
EDIT: Heh, we made front page.
Toastcfh and Decad3nce have given us HTC guys some incredible Kernels in the past. You might wanna run this past them if they haven't seen it already. I know zero about kernels or I would jump in this asap. There's nothing like flashing a kernel update script to find your device doesn't boot anymore
Alright let's create a repository to boot with then
Incoming here: https://github.com/project-voodoo/android_oc-uv_stability_test
Could you add me as aa collaborator? We also need to brainstorm names.
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ytt3r said:
Could you add me as aa collaborator? We also need to brainstorm names.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yep, I created a team on github containing already KhasMek, ogdobber, storm717, TheEscapistxda, you and me
I'm also on IRC (signature)
Got any ideas for a name? That's important...
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storm717 said:
nice posts bud-- good to see you starting the ball rolling from your idea on Twitter earlier. Just some quick info before I head out... more tonight probably
Some thoughts on the app:
the changing of states is definitely a huge thing to work into the tests, as this is where some of the more subtle problems between the voltage/freq steps seems to manifest themselves.
I have yet to find a synthetic test that can fail/detect problems as quickly as say launching a game like Cordy.., so there are ways to bash the system harder than the current tests it seems
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Eh he when the stability test is the latest app to detect errors or crash the phones it shows there's a lot to learn
storm717 said:
what i can bring to the table
No experience with the NDK but pretty solid C experience for embedded systems
Can probably help the most on UI/metrics/feedback parts of the app. Creating views to reflect test status, sysfs state info, etc. Example of an app that shows time_in_state info i wrote a few weekends ago -> CPU Spy
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sounds good. I have no experience with NDK either yet but reading the NDK samples a bit earlier showed that it is almost trivial to do the glue with it
What you did with CPU spy is awesome, it allows to understand very easily how the states & frequencies are used and also if the device enter sleep properly.
Looks simple but at the same time really useful. Congrats !
storm717 said:
my dev environment
Arch Linux
vim + android SDK command line tools
git for VCS (github for the few opensource projects I've done)
I'll be watching this thread to see what sort of dev activity we have going on over the next few days... looking forward to working with some of yall fellow XDA guys
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cool.
I guess most devs will use Eclipse but there is no problem building/editing the sources with or without Eclipse itself.
ytt3r said:
Got any ideas for a name? That's important...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would suggest OC/UV stability test, or Overclock stability test
You can never go wrong with a name describing what the application does.
− Especially with mobile apps which traditionally do one thing
I don't have any technical expertise to contribute to this project, but i've spent a whole lot of time staring at BIOS screens tweaking OC's. This is exactly what is missing from the Android OC scene. The app QuickClocks has a feature that attempts to do this, through what it calls a "lag spike test," but it did not behave properly on my Droid X. I will be following this project very closely and contributing whatever feedback i can. Good luck guys.
Looks like a great idea...
I am a huge PC overclocker. I have owned 2x HD2s now. First Euro over a year ago and could clock easy over 1400mhz. My new T-Mob crashes at 1190. Its the same kernal/ROM so its very clear to me its a voltage problem.
It sucks I cant clock it up more and willing to cost some battery sometimes. Great App going here guys keep up the good work.
id like to enroll for testing if possible, i know iv tested every version of SOK and helped with finding bugs. i know my phone is a quality built coz its rocking 1.4ghz stable wether it was gaming/stress-testing or whatever.
if u think i could be of any help with testing simply message me ^_^
I have an idea for apk Icon. I can make it once the name is figured out but it could be a clock with lighting bolts as the clock's hands to symbolize the clock speed of gpu / cpu and the bolts to symbolize the voltage.
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If you're like me, you love floating apps. They're a killer feature that makes multi-tasking that much easier. Chainfire just released his latest app, PerfMon in the play store. It's a floating performance monitor that tells you how much free memory you have, cpu core usage, and disk I/O usage among other useful metrics. It definitely looks useful when troubleshooting games, and seeing whether a slowdown is due to bad I/O or RAM usage. You can find it here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...51bGwsMSwxLDMsImV1LmNoYWluZmlyZS5wZXJmbW9uIl0.
Performance Monitor
I did application for monitoring CPU load and RAM usage for my purpose sometime ago. It would be interest in this application if costs 1$? Please, press "thanks" button if you would buy it. Current version has no any menu for settings, so I do not want to waste my time.
I can do chart of more than CPU and RAM, if somebody will want it...
APP IS PRETTY MUCH STABLE FOR EVERYDAY USAGE
BACKGROUND
Hello guys,
I'm not even a junior developer yet(soon) and I decided to practice and experiment on a self-made app. I always wanted to have an extensive battery stats app and that's why I chose to develop such one. To be honest, during the process I learned so many things about coding that nor the Java Course learned me, nor the university and I'm really glad that I'm working on it.
DESCRIPTION
This application is coded with the intention to provide you with information about your battery's health. It can measure the voltage, the charge / discharge rate, battery wear(only new and specific phones have such sensor) and temperature.
TODO:
* Add a battery report tool that will give information about all the battery statistics your device supports so it will be easier to add more supported devices
* Add a precise charger tester mode
* Add more supported devices
FINAL WORDS
I would be more than grateful if you download, test and let me know here how the app behaves for you(especially the update interval accuracy in the settings)
If you would like to donate me(paypal)
DOWNLOAD
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tanago.battinfo
Updated to version 1.1 (live on GPlay)
Added graph and background monitoring
Updated icons
Stability improvements