Where the story begins....

As soon as I bought my Hero, I loved the design, the functionality and the fun of it.

Only thing that kept from using it was the terrible performance of the device. Slow, constant lagging, completely unusable.

Seriously, the software virtual keyboard was just unusable and made the whole device useless. And frustrating !

It went back to its box for 2 weeks ! I reverted to my speedy iPhone 3GS: that one is a beast, well a mono-tasking beast, but still a beast! ;-)

The problem is when you have tasted Hero's Android with all the social networking integrated, the freedom to setup your scenes etc...you do miss it!

Then I thought, I need to look into this, there must be something wrong, something to fix.

After studying the device's behaviors I though this might be due, in part, to the low amount of RAM (196 Mb) available in the device.

After searching the Internet I cam across two big players in Android ROM customization: Cyanogen (works mostly on HTC Magic/Dream ROMs) and Paul from MoDaCo who works on many custom ROMs, one of them being the HTC Hero ROMs.

I immediately installed MoDaCo's custom ROM. And the performance gain was already very good, but keyboard and screen swiping kept lagging, and applications would take a lot of time to launch: all this kept me frustrated.

A few days later, after some pressure from the open-source community, HTC complied with android kernel's GPL license and finally released the sources for the kernel...and that's exactly when all the fun began !

First Paul (MoDaCo) released a custom kernel using compache and a few features but none of them were working yet (that kernel was 2.6.27-mck-1.2).

As Paul was busy, I took over the HTC kernel sources and started playing around.

I had been playing with Linux Kernel compiles for many years, tweaking the configurations of servers' kernels to get the most out of them.

First result was a kernel with the Compcache features, OpenVPN Tunnel support, Ext4 filesystem support, NFSv4 and CIFS (windows shares) mounting support, and some other tweaks in the configuration (mostly removing kernel hacking debug code).

At first I did all this for myself but when I saw the results, I decided I needed to share my findings with the community over at MoDaCo.

I released my kernel on MoDaCo's forums as version 1.3 (kernel : 2.6.27-mck-teknologist-1.3) and to credit Paul's excellent work, I kept the "mck" in the name and started at version 1.3

As soon as I shared it, people started reporting their devices as suddenly being lightning fast !

The post was a success and we had to create a new topic on the forum, devoted to discussions about the teknologist kernel update.

The rest of the story is pretty simple, I improved the update package with the main goal of making it newbie proof.

The result: an update zip file that applies to the MCR 2.8 and newer in a matter of second and doesn't need any user tweaking.

Recently I also started providing an update.zip file that applies to Generic ROMS.

Download, copy to sd-card, Update using Recovery menu (takes 5 secs), Reboot... that's pretty much all !

Latest and greatest version is 1.91 (kernel : 2.6.27-mck-teknologist-1.91).

It initializes on boot a 128Mb disksize for Compressed Compcache pool (if you require more infos on this, check the "Compcache Theory" page).

If you want to try this, check the How To Install page.

Since its release, it has been downloaded thousands of times with 99% reports of success and "instant gratification" in the forum ;-)

Reached a 1000 downloads on November 3rd 2009, just before the MCR 2.9 release.
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If you run into trouble or want to report success/failure please use the link to the appropriate MoDaCo forum on the right sidebar.

All this was possible because of the great work of both Cyanogen and Paul from MoDaCo which inspired me a lot !

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