[ROM][OVATION][EMMC][UNOFFICIAL] Liquidsmooth KitKat v3.2

[Jon Lee]

ROM:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/wkzcatpp7az4r5f/LS-KK-v3.2-2014-10-17-ovation.zip

MD5:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/piwirf8ee421dqv/LS-KK-v3.2-2014-10-17-ovation.zip.md5sum

A shoutout and thanks goes out to Rhyang for his help with the Slimkat rom, (to which this is somewhat similar).

Compiled with Sabermod toolchains. 4.8 for the rom and 4.7.4 for the kernel.
O3 optimized.

I made an attempt to fix 'OK Google'. Dunno if it's working or not (haven't tested). If it's still broken then it will be in the board files and will be a bear to try and find....

Dunno, it seems to work fairly well (ALMOST as good as Cyanogenmod 10.1 ) I kinda like it in a way (except it's KitKat).

I'll try and upload some source later. My internet connection has been giving me problems lately (took four hours or so to upload this). Even with source this is somewhat difficult to compile anyways (I fought with it some).

Cheers!

 

[daveyacarter]

Great. I'll download now and try it out today :good::good:

 

[Arbelzapf]

Oh man I love LiquidSmooth! I am using it on my phone and have never looked back.
I guess I will have to give this a try. Thanks a lot for this. Is it also running on your yellow kernel or something different?

 

[daveyacarter]

Which Gapps file is used with the rom please?

 

[Jon Lee]

Yes it's using the same kernel as Slimkat except that /sound and /drivers/mfd folders have been swapped out with their CM11 kernel counterparts.

If you go into settings and 'about tablet', you will find download links to two types of gapps, full and minimal.

 

[mcord11758]

Things are running well. OK Google doors not appear to work too well

 

[webdroidmt]

Yes it's using the same kernel as Slimkat except that /sound and /drivers/mfd folders have been swapped out with their CM11 kernel counterparts.

If you go into settings and 'about tablet', you will find download links to two types of gapps, full and minimal.

Hey Jon, thanks for yet another new rom. :good: Looking pretty cool so far but as already mentioned, "Ok Google" is not working properly. I swapped out your yellow kernel with the stock CM11 kernel and Google Now is working as it should.

Since I lack the capability to compile a kernel, I simply replaced the yellow kernel boot image and the entire modules folder in /system/lib with the CM11 boot image and modules folder. I hated to lose the yellow kernel as I feel that it has better performance than stock CM11 but I love using OK Google. Btw, I did the same with your Slim rom with similar positive results.

Also, I see in the build prop that the density is set to 320DPI instead of the standard 240. I happen to prefer 320 but I would think that the masses might want the standard density and would be wondering why their desktop looks so big.

Anyway, thanks again for your contributions. It's appreciated.

Mike T

 

[angelofmenoth]

Ooh, nice!

 

[PMikeP]

Wow, is this fast!

So many ROMs, so little time.

I've been using CM 11 nightlies for a couple months now and didn't have many complaints. The usual CM 11 screen flicker problem when charging, some screen black outs (and crashes) on a certain screen in one of my aviation apps. That was about it. CM 11 was fairly fast and incrementally getting better all the time.

CM 11 doesn't have zRAM built in (yet), so I got a lot of app restarts when switching between my high memory aviation moving maps and other apps. But we're trying an experimental zRAM build that's helping with the HD+'s limited RAM.

But then I got a wild hair and decided to look around in the HD forum to see if perhaps Jon had an OC kernel for CM 11. Then I found his build of Liquidsmooth for the HD+. I didn't want to spend a half day wiping and installing a completely different ROM. But I'm glad I did. Wow.

I don't know if it's the overclocking or the other tweaks or all the above, but my AnTuTu score jumped from 17300 to 19100! Thanks, Jon!

(Hotplug governor seems to work best for me in both LS and CM 11. Too early to tell, but battery life doesn't seem any worse in LS.)

I assume that LS does not force the CPU to 100% when running AnTuTu, as CM 11 does. So the 19100 is probably a realistic reflection of performance.

(I haven't experimented with the I/O scheduler yet. I left it set at fiops for now. (Supposedly best for flash memory. Heretofore I've always used Deadline.) I lowered the SD cache to 512, which I found worked best in CM 11. (Using SD Booster to make that change.) FWIW, I enabled the GPU Acceleration and Super Tweaks in LS. )

[FWIW, the word "compiler" is misspelled (twice) in the "Just in Time Complier [sic]" setting.]

I'm happy to report that the screen flickering/crashes are gone when on that special page in my aviation moving map that always flickered - and sometimes crashed - in CM 11. (Requiring that I disabled HW overlays in Developer Options in CM11.) And since I set the "Low Memory Killer" to "Light" in LS, it doesn't kill my apps as aggressively as CM 11 did. (Not apples and oranges, because I was running ART in CM 11, whereas LS implies you shouldn't even try ART.) LS should be even better with zRAM. (And the boot animation is better than the frowning, scary CM alien face. )

(Speaking of zRAM, I noticed that someone in the Slimkat forum is running zRAM on Slimkat. I read here that Slim and LS are kinda the same. Is there a way to turn zRAM on it LS?)

I'd be curious to know what the major differences are between LiquidSmooth and Slimkat. Since Jon says LS is "similar" to Slimkat, why does LS exist?

Not much I could find on the web about it. I looked at the Slim home page. It's main advantage seems to be fancy interface stuff. (Although LS has PIE too.) Kinda like a toned down version of PAC? But the LS home page is silent about what makes it better/different.

Like I need to spend another half day wiping and flashing can customizing another ROM. (Titanium Backup is supposed to save data/settings. If it does, it doesn't seem to work for me. I have to reset the Settings on my apps when I restore from Titanium.)

---------- Post added at 10:34 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:21 AM ----------

Every trying for that last bit of performance, some questions:

Q: On zip align apps on boot. Should I expect a toast or a notification if an app needed to be zip aligned?

Q: In CM 11, there's a Developer's Option to kill an app with a long press of the Back button. (Seems to be different from swiping "closed" in Recents, in that it completely shuts down the app.) Is there a similar trick in LS?

Q: I updated the host file for disable ads. I got a message that it worked, 0/4. Zero out of Four? That doesn't sound right. Is it?

Q: In CM's Launcher settings, you can disable transitions, stop scrolling wallpaper, etc. But I can't find a way to disable transitions - especially in the App drawer - in LS. (I see ways to change the transitions, but none of the options have "None.") Where are they or what's the trick to kill them?

Q: Last, and this is more of a Slimkat design element, but shouldn't there be a "Close All" button in the Slim Recent panel?

 

[rhyang]

Q: Last, and this is more of a Slimkat design element, but shouldn't there be a "Close All" button in the Slim Recent panel?

For a while SlimROMs said they wouldn't support this, but now you can close all apps in the recents panel with a two-finger pinch. I think they might even have a youtube video of this ...

I like Slim because it's minimalist -- no bloated theme engine and its associated bugs. That said, their drivers tend to be a little more out of date than CM. The framework source is also slightly different. This makes sharing code between the two a PIA sometimes. I have no familiarity with LS, so I'm not sure how applicable these comments are to it.

Looks like you've been busy Jon

 

[PMikeP]

For a while SlimROMs said they wouldn't support this, but now you can close all apps in the recents panel with a two-finger pinch. I think they might even have a youtube video of this ...

Thanks. I found the pinch gesture serendipitously while trying to swipe away a running app in Recents. Still, it's problematic trying to get it to 'close all' all the time. I went back to stock Recents for now. (Favorites implementation in LS Recents might be nice, as they've implemented in Slim, but I haven't figured out how to invoke it in LS if it's there.)

 

[Jon Lee]

Here's the device and vendor source as promised:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/z3llb4mauxo8m16/liquidsmooth.tar.gz
Let me know if you need help or any other source to build.

I kept this one very much "original"/plain, meaning I didn't add the zram script (or anything else extra).

To add zram to it, just extract the attached 60ZRM script to /system/etc/init.d
(make sure it is executable & root:shell owned), and reboot.

I believe as far as 'ok google' is concerned, the next step would be to compile with the normal vanilla Cyanogenmod defconfig (sorry, but I refuse to install Gapps just to test). Microphone works, mixer values are the same, so... There's a reason I disabled some of that IPv6 stuff...

Behind the scenes I've been (rather unsuccessfully) attempting a port of ION CMA Heap.
http://pastebin.com/J1Ptxz3W
(Which is why I shared the first build without adding any extras, because I knew I was going to break it immediately following).

BTW, I'm still very new at compiling android and it will take me some time to become better acquainted with the build process.

 

[PMikeP]

A hack to fix auditd error "protocol not supported"

To add zram to it, just extract the attached 60ZRM script to /system/etc/init.d (make sure it is executable & root:shell owned), and reboot.

Thanks again Jon! The Permissions for your script file were correct from the start. I don't know how to make sure it was root:shell owned, but it worked nevertheless.

Now, a hack to stop auditd errors:

After I got my apps reinstalled and set late last night, I decided to run catlog, just to see what I could see.

LiquidSmooth is definitely quieter than CM 11. (In the sense of less processes starting and stopping.) To be fair, not quite apples to apples because I'm back to running Dalvik on LS and was running ART on CM 11. (ART comes alive frequently to trim memory.)

But there was one process in LS, that I didn't notice in CM 11, auditd, that just kept starting and stopping with an Error, "Protocol not supported."

Despite that fact that auditd is constantly trying to run, it doesn't stop one of the CPU cores from shutting down (with Hotplug governor), nor does it prevent the CPU from dropping to its lowest freq. So, in practice, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Still, it can't be good to have this one thread constantly starting and stopping and it bugged me.

Now, maybe I caused the problem, because I typically uninstall a lot of Google junk and I disable a lot of Google services in the junk I can't remove. (Boy, Google just keeps pinging and pinging you!) And I hadn't run catlog with a virgin build of LS to see if the auditd Error was there at first.

Having said that, I did find a few other people on Google asking about the same auditd Error. (Apparently, auditd is a process from Sun.)

On the assumption you all get the same Error too, the best way to stop this would be to find out why it's trying to start. And to stop it. (Duh.) But that's WAY beyond me. So instead, I simply renamed the auditd file in /system/bin (it's a binary) to auditd.old.

I cringe when I think about it, but it worked anyway. (Worked in the sense that I don't get the auditd Error anymore.)

(As I write this, I wonder if the "d" at the end of audit is Unix convention to signal a daemon? If so, the I suppose there's probably a start up folder or file somewhere in Linux that's trying to start it? Or do daemons start themselves?)

 

[mcord11758]

When streaming video on any room using yellow kernel I get occasional freezes that require powering off my nook

 

[PMikeP]

Can I use Yellow Kernel in CM 11?

I swapped out your yellow kernel with the stock CM11 kernel and Google Now is working as it should.

Since I lack the capability to compile a kernel, I simply replaced the yellow kernel boot image and the entire modules folder in /system/lib with the CM11 boot image and modules folder.

Clever! So, then, can I do this in reverse and swap Jon' s OC kernel into a CM 11 build?

 

[webdroidmt]

Clever! So, then, can I do this in reverse and swap Jon' s OC kernel into a CM 11 build?

Never tried but in theory, it should work. Best way to find out is to make a nandroid and try it.

Mike T

 

[PMikeP]

Never tried but in theory, it should work. Best way to find out is to make a nandroid and try it.

I tried it. Unfortunately on first boot, after immediately getting the CM set up screen, I got the message "Unfortunately, the process com.android.phone has stopped." (It didn't even go thru the process of updating apps like it normally does after a clean wipe, so something seems wrong. I re-did a second Factory Resent and /system wipe. Still no joy.)

So let's make sure I'm doing what you did. I downloaded the latest CM Nightly zip. I have Jon's LS zip. I opened both archives in 7zip.

I took Jon's boot.img from the LS zip and copied over (and replaced) CM's boot.img. I did the same with the modules folder in /system/lib. Then I closed up 7zip and tried installing the new hybrid CM 11 zip file.

But, since you said that you found that "Ok Google" didn't work for you on LS with Jon's kernel, it occurs to me that maybe you made these changes in a running install? That is, I would first install a "stock" CM 11 Nightly and then, after it's running, go in and change boot.img and modules? (I think changing the boot img in the partition would be a challenge for me.)

 

[webdroidmt]

I tried it. Unfortunately on first boot, after immediately getting the CM set up screen, I got the message "Unfortunately, the process com.android.phone has stopped." (It didn't even go thru the process of updating apps like it normally does after a clean wipe, so something seems wrong. I re-did a Factory Resent and /system wipe. Still no joy.)

So let's make sure I'm doing what you did. I downloaded the latest CM Nightly zip. I have Jon's LS zip. I opened both archives in 7zip.

I took Jon's boot.img from the LS zip and copied over (and replaced) CM's boot.img. I did the same with the modules folder in /system/lib. Then I closed up 7zip and tried installing the new hybrid CM 11 zip file.

But, since you said that you found that "Ok Google" didn't work for you on LS with Jon's kernel, it occurs to me that maybe you made these changes in a running install? That is, I would first install a "stock" CM 11 Nightly and then, after it's running, go in and change boot.img and modules? (I think changing the boot img in the partition would be a challenge for me.)

You did it right. I did a total clean install of the Liquid rom with the newly "implanted" CM11 kernel. I wouldn't mess around with the partitions, dangerous territory. :laugh:
There's possibly some "hook" that Yellow is looking for that is not contained in CM11.

After reading your post, I just decided to see if it would work in reverse. I also got the same process phone has stopped error. With the ease of making nandroid backups, stuff like this is always worth a try when it's something you want or need. I'm thrilled that it works the other way, as I do use "Ok Google" a lot on all my devices and this Liquid rom runs nicely on the Nook.

In addition, with the introduction of Lollipop, Google has revamped GN and it's even better to use than before.

Mike T

 

[PMikeP]

You did it right. . . .

After reading your post, I just decided to see if it would work in reverse. I also got the same process phone has stopped error.

Good to know I'm not alone then. Oh well, it was a promising experiment.

(Last night I tried experimenting (hacking) to get zRAM to point to a swap file on /cache. Not really a LS thing, but I might write about it later.)

 

[vimesxda]

I tried installing this today and it ran really nice and smoothly, but it doesnt seem to have the full HD+ screen resolution. Seemed more like 720p than 1080, large fonts and icons, just a lower resolution. Am I missing a setting or is it not working at full resolution?