Reduce Game Lag on Nexus 7 and Other Devices with Seeder Entropy Generator
on January 3, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Despite some truly top notch hardware, some high end Android devices still seem to have trouble with some games. There are mods out there to fix these lag issues, as the underlying cause usually equates to some issue with the processor not working to its full capacity. There is now a new fix for Nexus 7 devices to help reduce game lag.
XDA Senior Member lambgx02 originally posted the Seeder Entropy Generator to stop lag on various Android devices. The running premise was that most game lag was caused by entropy. As lambgx02 explains:
So, I was experiencing significant lag as we all do from time to time, and decided I was going to get to the bottom of it.
After tracing and debugging for hours, I discovered the source of 90% of Android’s lag. In a word, entropy (or lack thereof).
Google’s JVM, like Sun’s, reads from /dev/random. For all random data. Yes, the /dev/random that uses a very limited entropy pool.
Random data is used for all kinds of stuff.. UUID generation, session keys, SSL.. when we run out of entropy, the process blocks. That manifests itself as lag. The process cannot continue until the kernel generates more high quality random data.
So, I cross-compiled rngd, and used it to feed /dev/urandom into /dev/random at 1 second intervals.
The result of fixing this issue is that games run much, much smoother. XDA Recognized Contributor bradman117 tested and confirmed it worked for the Nexus 7 and posted where more users can see it. So far, users have have reported excellent results. Installation is easy as well, as it’s a simple zip to flash in recovery.
To see more, check out the Nexus 7 thread as well as the original thread.
