Team Epic Development Fund

Dear Epic 4G community,

We have merged the Epic 4G donor list to Team Epic's new blog.  Your support has made it possible to raise nearly $5,000 in funds toward build server upgrades, phones and other development expenses.  This generous community underwriting has made it possible for the team to expand and begin to support development of other flagship Samsung phones on Sprint like the Epic Touch and Galaxy Nexus.

The team is is now fixing bugs to prepare for CM9 beta3 for Epic 4G.  A great many bugs have already been fixed and new features are working!  If you follow us on Google+ you can help us to test builds as we approach release.  Epic 4G is still a great phone and this team will continue to update CyanogenMod to support it for the foreseeable future.

In an unusual but highly successful move, we have invited Alias8818 of Epic 4G AOKP to collaborate on common issues as a member of Team Epic.  This has turned out to be a healthy partnership as we have learned about fixes in AOKP to merge into CM, and AOKP relies on CM for device bug fixes.

If you appreciate our work, please consider supporting our team with a tiny contribution of $5.  We are currently saving up reserves to purchase Sprint's upcoming SGS3 for our lead developers, as we believe it will be the best Android phone on Sprint.  We sincerely hope it will have a slider keyboard like the first generation SGS Epic 4G, but even without a keyboard it will be an awesome phone that we want CyanogenMod to work well with.

Thank you!

Nexus S 4G KANG to Epic 4G

Today I had an opportunity to purchase a Nexus S 4G with clean ESN from Craigslist at a bargain price of $140.  We wouldn't be able to buy dev phones like this if it were not for Epic community donations.  There is much we can learn from this very similar phone to improve Epic's ICS experience.  Their similarity helps us to be able to compare Epic's behavior, code and bugs to Google's leaked Android 4.0.4 and CM9 Android 4.0.3.

Below are a few thoughts after examining AOSP 4.0.4 and CM9 4.0.3 on how we can improve Epic CM9:

• Sprint PRL and Profile update (and Activation?)
• Auto-brightness more responsive than Epic.  It also seems to be more dim than Epic, saving extra battery.
• Strength of haptic feedback is much weaker than Epic.  Onscreen keyboard seems to be 10% of Epic, just barely enough to feel it.  This points toward yet more opportunities to tune Epic for battery savings.
• CM9 has built-in tuning options for the CPU governor.
• CM9 has built-in tuning for Voodoo color.  It does however seem to suffer from the same ugly color gradients that happen on Epic when we tried a Voodoo color port.  The Epic CM team will need to determine if we can fix the Voodoo defaults to not be ugly, and decide if we want to later include Voodoo color in the default kernel.
• CM9 Nexus S 4G includes overclocking.  The Epic CM team has not yet decided if we will include overclocking in the default kernel, because stability is our top priority.
• CM9 Nexus S 4G uses the 3.0.17 kernel with Kernel samepage merging (KSM), with a convenient menu option to enable it in Settings > Performance > Memory management.  KSM frees up ~2-15MB of RAM but at a heavy cost, constantly scanning memory for pages to unify, eating battery and preventing the processor from sleeping.  Epic's kernel already appears to give ~11MB more RAM to userspace than Nexus S 4G.  We will probably have KSM as an option after Epic ports to a 3.x-based kernel, but we will not likely recommend its use.  There are other approaches like the CMA allocator or hardware accel blacklist that would save us a lot more memory without such heavy cost of CPU.
• We need to port Epic's current 2.6.35-based kernel to 3.x.  It now appears that merging with KalimochoAz's crespo kernel would be a good idea.  jnadke is working on this general issue.

If you appreciate our work, please consider supporting the Epic CM team.

Hardware Purchased, More Progress

It took us a few days to decide what hardware to purchase for the team's build server.  We originally planned on upgrading an existing University's server with an additional Xeon processor, RAM and SSD in order to allow it to build Android very quickly.  Unfortunately, it became cost prohibitive to find a guaranteed-to-work Xeon as it must match the existing processor down to the stepping level.  We then discovered that for little more than the price of the Xeon alone, we can buy an entirely new 1U rackmount server with 2 x 6 core Opteron processors.  This new plan is superior as by late February, we will have this monster build server in Uberpinguin's basement.

Epic CM Team's Build Server

• 2x6 core 3.1GHz Opteron
• 32GB DDR3 RDIMM
• 300GB Intel 320 SSD

Fund Raising Status Update

• As of February 3rd, 2012, $2,568 has been donated from 127 members of the Epic Community.
• We are now in the process of ordering hardware.
• We now recommend donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as they do good work to protect our digital rights and privacy.  However, if you insist on giving your thanks to the Epic CM team, here is how you can donate to support us.  Future donations will go toward supporting CM upstream, hardware repairs and future dev phones.  Our expenses will be published publicly in this spreadsheet.
• Read here and here for earlier posts about the fund drive.