Faster Boot Times and Making the Overall OS Faster?

ToxxyToxical

Hey Emteria!

I just recently started playing around with my RPi 3B again and I wanted to make a Carputer. I have everything I need (Emteria has been a huge help with this project and I'm very pleased so far, even with the Evaluation version) and I'm ready to mount it in my car. I have two questions before I do so.

1.) Is it possible to change the time it takes for the power to be received by the RPi up until the main Android UI? (For example: Possibly speed past the Emteria logo upon boot and jump straight to the Android UI?) It isn't a huge deal at all since I usually get in my car and take a minute or two to connect my phone to my current head unit and begin driving, and it only takes about 40 seconds for my RPi to boot to the Android UI. It would be amazing to turn on my car and, within 10 - 20 seconds, have the Android UI already up and ready to go. If not, I'm guessing picking up a faster Micro SD card would work better? (I currently have a MicroSDXC Class 10 [I think?] by PNY, 64GB. It's the one with a green and grey border)

2.) Can I change some of the Android UI Animations to speed up the OS and decrease the amount of CPU, GPU, and RAM usage? I know you can do it on official Android devices but I would like to make the UI more snappy so I can quickly switch songs, look up a song, change the destination on Waze, or do more when I'm stopped in my car. I have already changed the background to a straight up black background, however, that barely does anything. I know you can change the screen resolution to a lower resolution to make everything run a lot faster, but, I haven't been able to properly test something like that in my car. (I don't want to have to see only one song on my Spotify playlist per scroll if you know what I mean.)

Anyway, thank you so much for the development of Emteria and I'm sure I'm going to put the OS to good use with more things I'm going to add later on down the road. (Pick up a USB microphone and attach it somewhere in my car for hands-free phone calls and possibly Discord calls...OOOO There's a suggestion. An Emteria Discord server would be cool to have to quickly share ideas and get in touch with the Devs for support a bit quicker hehe.)

Looking forward to a response,
-Bradley

SurprysE

@ToxxyToxical said:
Hey Emteria!

I just recently started playing around with my RPi 3B again and I wanted to make a Carputer. I have everything I need (Emteria has been a huge help with this project and I'm very pleased so far, even with the Evaluation version) and I'm ready to mount it in my car. I have two questions before I do so.

1.) Is it possible to change the time it takes for the power to be received by the RPi up until the main Android UI? (For example: Possibly speed past the Emteria logo upon boot and jump straight to the Android UI?) It isn't a huge deal at all since I usually get in my car and take a minute or two to connect my phone to my current head unit and begin driving, and it only takes about 40 seconds for my RPi to boot to the Android UI. It would be amazing to turn on my car and, within 10 - 20 seconds, have the Android UI already up and ready to go. If not, I'm guessing picking up a faster Micro SD card would work better? (I currently have a MicroSDXC Class 10 [I think?] by PNY, 64GB. It's the one with a green and grey border)

1)The "Emteria" message at startup is part of the boot, it can theoretically be removed but it is not that it recovers a lot of startup time.
I recently discovered (yesterday) that the speed of android does not depend very much on the sequential speed but on the IOPS (Input/output operations per second) that MicroSD can do, a bit like SSD discs.
So the more operations per second the MicroSD can do, the faster and smoother the startup.
I suggest you use a MicroSD with App Performance A1
Special attention should also be paid to apps that automatically start with the operating system at startup:
The more they are, the slower the system.
This is what I have and it works very well:

https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B06XYT37NK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You can use other brands as well, as long as A1 or A2 is on them.

2.) Can I change some of the Android UI Animations to speed up the OS and decrease the amount of CPU, GPU, and RAM usage? I know you can do it on official Android devices but I would like to make the UI more snappy so I can quickly switch songs, look up a song, change the destination on Waze, or do more when I'm stopped in my car. I have already changed the background to a straight up black background, however, that barely does anything. I know you can change the screen resolution to a lower resolution to make everything run a lot faster, but, I haven't been able to properly test something like that in my car. (I don't want to have to see only one song on my Spotify playlist per scroll if you know what I mean.)

2) I haven't tried it yet, but in the development options you should be able to find the voices to turn the effects off in the same way you would with any android.

Anyway, thank you so much for the development of Emteria and I'm sure I'm going to put the OS to good use with more things I'm going to add later on down the road. (Pick up a USB microphone and attach it somewhere in my car for hands-free phone calls and possibly Discord calls...OOOO There's a suggestion. An Emteria Discord server would be cool to have to quickly share ideas and get in touch with the Devs for support a bit quicker hehe.)

Looking forward to a response,
-Bradley

ToxxyToxical

SurprysE,

Thanks for the response!

I will definitely look into picking up the MicroSD card you listed above. The only app I'll be running on boot is Kodi with the CarPC-xTouch skin so there shouldn't be any problem with booting the Android OS and having it run slower as I add programs.

I also completely forgot that you can enable developer options on Android OS and configure the animations and look of the UI to make it run faster. I haven't had to do something like this in a while so it didn't even cross my mind to try that out. Thank you for reminding me!

I'm going to try a few different things and run some tests, then create a separate discussion about speeding up your UI for projects like these to help others getting started with Emteria.

Best Regards,
-Bradley

gsfx

Hello,

Here you can find a list of cards. They show also the IOPS.

https://www.speicherkarten.guru/-Rangliste/microSD

I owned a Samsung Evo Plus 128 GB SDXC card. It has 865 IOPS when writing. That should comply with the A1 standard, but that is not shown on the card.

Best regards

gsfx

ToxxyToxical

gsfx,

Thank you for providing me with that information!

I've been looking into some cards and that definitely helped me out.

Thank you again,
-Bradley

gsfx

My second card is a Sandisk Ultra 128 GB:

https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/sd-cards/sandisk-ultra-80-mbs-uhs-i-128gb-microsdxc-memory-card/

Seems to be good, too.

Best regards

gsfx

webhopper

For those using the 64, 128 GB SDs, do you get the correct Settings -> Storage used? My 64 GB shows 33.69 GB of 59.48 GB used after just the initial emteria install. But things seem to be working normally. It was in a GoPro, then I ran SDFormatter on it.

roxette

@webhopper, read this
#3458

albdom

@SurprysE said:

1)The "Emteria" message at startup is part of the boot, it can theoretically be removed but it is not that it recovers a lot of startup time.
I recently discovered (yesterday) that the speed of android does not depend very much on the sequential speed but on the IOPS (Input/output operations per second) that MicroSD can do, a bit like SSD discs.
So the more operations per second the MicroSD can do, the faster and smoother the startup.
I suggest you use a MicroSD with App Performance A1
Special attention should also be paid to apps that automatically start with the operating system at startup:
The more they are, the slower the system.
This is what I have and it works very well:

https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B06XYT37NK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You can use other brands as well, as long as A1 or A2 is on them.

Thanks, I have bought that SD card, but 32 GB model, and system speed has improved.

kknott

I’m surprised you were able to get a UHS card to boot, my sandisk uhs card wouldn’t, just showed a red led after flashing, tried two of them.