Go faster, longer with Tiamat 4.08 EVO kernel on your rooted HTC EVO 4G
One of the core benefits of rooting your HTC EVO 4G, aside from being able to remove bloatware and flash ROMs, is the ability to change out the kernel to something snappier, faster, and more efficient. For quite a while now, one of them reigned supreme among Tiamat's EVO 4G AOSP ROM kernels: 3.3.7 aka the Bruce Lee kernel (so dubbed due to it kicking ass, and the number 337 looking a bit like "LEE" rotated clockwise 180 degrees).
The past couple of revisions have not worked so well on my phone. They weren't life-threatening, but the benefits were not great enough to outweigh the stability issues I was having. I played extensively with 4.0.7, which I will call the LOb due to me wanting to throw my phone at a wall and that it looks a bit like LOb upside down, and went back to the LEE.
Version 4.0.8 was released a few days ago, and among its improvements and features over 4.0.7 is a new CPU governer named Smartass V2 along with boot/speed improvements. Its improvements over stock kernels are the ability to overclock and underclock, TeamWin HDMI support, kernel level undervolting/undervolting support, and a host of other things that just make my EVO and battery happy.
I've noticed since installing that Smartass V2 feels snappier, my battery life seems as good or better as the LEE kernel offered, and I have not had any of the stability issues I had after 3.3.7. There are several different hardware revisions of HTC EVO 4Gs, and tons of ROMs that all interact differently with different kernels, so your mileage may vary.
As always with any flashing, I advise that you make a Nandroid backup. Additionally as some people have some issues with flashing kernels (such as some just won't work no matter what you do), I'd advise having a copy of another kernel sitting around in case you need to flash it.
You can download Tiamat 4.0.8 (which I will call Bob for the same reasons the other was called LEE) and flash via recovery, or install automatically through TeamWin's Kernel Manager. I'm betting there are other ways as well.
Here's a quick and incomplete list of how to flash a kernel (after you make the Nandroid backup) should you have issues using Kernel Manager:
- Download the kernel zip to the root directory of your sd card
- Reboot phone into recovery mode
- Wipe dalvik and cache
- Flash zip from sdcard
- Choose zip to flash
- Select the Tiamat kernel you downloaded
- Flash and reboot
- Walk away for 12 minutes (it will be an extremely long boot)
- Enjoy
Let us know how this works for you if you try it.
It's worked pretty well so far for me. It comes in both SBC and non-SBC flavors; I've personally been running SBC kernels to get extended battery life for 7 months, and my now-$7 battery has not exploded or corroded.
Your CPU managing software (setcpu, built-in, etc.) or ROM may require being updated to see Tiamat's new Smartass V2 option.
Thanks, Ropodope!
