Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite has got an excellent response from the consumers as well as a good community that has been built on XDA, where the developers are taking the initiative to build custom ROMS. Now you can also download the best custom kernel for Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite to enhance your device and make it more powerful.
As of now, there are two custom Kernels available for Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite that can be used with MIUI and AOSP based custom ROM. All these custom Kernels can be flashed on any ROM, which is running on Android 9 Pie. You may also consider to flash Android 10 custom ROM and test the following kernels and report it to us in the comments section. Do not forget to take the backup of your current kernel.
Table of Contents
What Is a Kernel?
Android devices use the Linux kernel; every phone utilizes their variant of it. Linux kernel maintainers keep everything tidy and accessible, contributors (such as Google) include or change things to meet their demands, and the people creating the hardware contribute too since they need to come up with hardware drivers to the parts they’re using for your kernel version they are using. This is the reason why independent Android programmers and hackers take time to vent new releases to older devices and get everything working.
Drivers are written to utilize one version of the kernel for a phone that might not work with another version of applications, which is important because the kernel’s primary functions are to control the hardware. It is a great deal of source code, using many more options while constructing it than you can imagine, but ultimately it is only the intermediary between the hardware and the software.
It sounds complicated, and it’s. Nevertheless, it’s also pretty standard computer logic, there’s an act of any kind generated for every single event, and based on that action, things happen to the running applications. With no kernel to take and send info, programmers would have to write code for every event for every single piece of hardware inside your apparatus. The kernel helps communicate with it through the Android program APIs, and hardware developers only need to produce the device hardware communicate with the kernel.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Custom Kernel
Advantages:
- A custom kernel can provide extra features and configurations.
- Developers can add new features from other smartphones kernels that do not exist for your device.
- It helps you maintain the CPU power and lets you save the battery life.
- You can configure the I/O scheduler that is used and lots of other stuff.
- You have the ability to control the maximum and minimum frequencies of the CPU that can scale up or down using a kernel auditor.
Disadvantages:
- If you are not careful enough while using the custom kernel, you can end up harming your device to the extent of bricking it.
Custom Kernel For Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
There are two custom kernels for Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite (Platina) as of now under ongoing development. The custom kernels we are talking about are Acrux Kernel and Fera Kernel that support both stock MIUI and any AOSP based custom ROM running on Android Pie 9.
Acrux Kernel
Acrux Kernel V4.4 ALS based is imported cleanly from Xiaomi, EAS kernel with HMP packs removed, and has been updated to the latest CAG. The custom kernel is also upstreamed with the mainline Linux, which aims to provide a balance of performance and battery backup.
Features
- Latest CAF tag merged
- Xiaomi code cleaned up to stable Android with minimal changes
- Wi-Fi driver imported from CAF and maintained
- Energy-aware scheduling
- Developers own capacity-based energy model included (more battery life and performance compared to any other EM)
- Disable kernel-wide debugging (debug_fs and debug_kernel removed)
- F2FS rapid GC
- Stune boosting locked to 1
- Compiled with DragonTC 9 (clang with Polly optimizations)
- Klapse and kcal
- Wake up all idle CPUs before suspending (helps with idle drain)
- Turn off schedule auto grouping
- Set CPUBW governor to bw_hwmon
- Optimize UFS stack
- Improve camera performance and drain
- Use analog dimming
- Use system-wide interruptible waits
- Force block requests onto their origin CPU
- mm/ optimizations
- Add dynamic bitclk and fps support to the panel
- Remove some high priority work queues from useless things
- Link /dev/urandom to /dev/random
- Add and refactor make flags
- Fix memory overlaps
- Fix qcacld-3.0 wifi bug where the signal would be 0 in QS/status bar
- VDSO32 enabled
- Speedup EXT4
- Omit useless dtbs
- Use 100Hz timer
- Remove all debugging and tracing drivers
- Debug kernel and debug fs gone
Download
The link for the download contains previous builds as well directly from the developer nysadev from XDA. Try to figure out the latest version by sorting the upload date or by checking the date stamp on the kernel.
Acrux Kernel – Download
Fera Kernel
Fera Kernel is a mix of Acrux Kernel as the base and stock kernel configurations, which few changes on the top by developer Feravolt. The custom kernel has been tested on the latest stable MIUI v10.3 and works on all other custom ROMs based on Android Pie 9. The main aim of building this kernel is to provide maximum stability to Mi 8 Lite.
Features
- Used clean 4.4.184 kernel version with fixed WiFi driver
- Compiled with latest GCC 10
- Compiled with ultimate kernel code optimizations flags
- Updated kernel base with last changes for sdm660 from CAF MSM-4.4 (framebuffer, camera, ups, etc.)
- GPU overclock to 700МHz
- Kernel version upstreamed to 4.4.196
- Ported some libs from 5.х kernel
- Added LZ4 support
- Disabled all kernel tracing
- Power-save CPU work-queues
- RAM bus freqs will be raised quicker on high loads.
- Activated multi-threading for crypto routines
- Faster VM allocation
- Disabled unneeded task stats
- Reduced log buffers memory
- Enabled all Cgroups for better system handling
- Heavily reduced various kernel debugging
- Disabled core dumps
- Disabled modules signature verification
- More power-saving kernel
- Disabled GPU wake on-screen touch
- Updated WIFI driver to the latest version (5.1.1.74N)
- Enabled Clean-cache framework
- Enabled Front-swap framework
- Enable ZSwap & zbud
- Swap service can run only on small cores
- Cleaned kernel cmdline
- Disabled unneeded drivers
- Enabled MSM HW random generator
- Increased audio buffer size
- Enabled the FS cache framework
- Enabled NTFS (rw) support
- Enabled Samba (SMB) network file system
- Optimized crypto routines
- Added, activated & set as default very latest version of ‘anxiety’ I/O scheduler
- Activated & set as default ‘westwood’ TCP congression controller
- Updated MSM-Adreno-TZ GPU governor to the very latest version
- Tuned simple-ondemand GPU governor for better performance
- Added & activated Adreno idler logic
- Added Adreno boost logic
- Disabled CRC checks while booting
- Tuned GPU idle timeout
- Undervolted GPU
- Set minimal GPU freq as default
- Disabled few more unneeded drivers
- Overclocked CPU – BIG cores to 2.5Ghz
- Slightly undervolted CPU
- Slightly undervolted display
- Increased CMA memory size
- Increased thermal polling interval
- Added TTL fixup support
- Super-fast random entropy generator
- Tuned VM tweaks
- I2C/SPI bus max freq overclock from 500 to 800Mhz
- Updated GPU KGSL driver
- Enhanced arm64 NEON instructions
- The optimized interactive CPU governor
- Added new FS sdfat v2.1.8
- Meltdown CPU protection is off (slows down CPU & nobody will hack you over wifi while u use updated & secure browser)
Download
The current version for Fera Kernel is v7, and the developer updates the kernel frequently. You can bookmark this page or leave a comment to get the latest updates on this kernel when released.
Fera Kernel – Download
Instructions to Flash
To flash the custom kernel on Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite, you must have an unlocked bootloader and TWRP installed.
- Download and copy the custom kernel to the internal storage of your device
- Reboot to TWRP (Turn off your device and press and hold Volume Up + Power Button until you see the MI logo.
- Go to install and select the custom kernel and swipe to flash
- It will ask you to clean the cache/Dalvik cache. You may clean it and reboot it to the system.
- Enjoy!