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Micromax A110 gets overclocking and swap support with ThunderZap kernel

Thanks to the leak of Mediatek's MT6577 chipset's kernel source, xda recognized developer varun.chitre15 has developed a kernel for the Micromax A110 Canvas 2, which brings many coveted features to the device and has set a new milestone in the development of the device which has been a star performer for Micromax in the past few months.
Varun.chitre15 had set up a campaign a while back, to urge Micromax to release kernel sources for their devices. Though Micromax didn't show any positive moves in this direction, it was the leak of the MT6577 kernel sources that has helped bring this thing up. This news also opens up the gate for other developers who can try to do the same for devices that run on the MT6577 chipset, like Micromax's very own A89 Ninja. May the popularity of this kernel lead Micromax to think about releasing kernel sources for their devices in the future. Talking about the kernel, the kernel is only for Ice Cream Sandwich, and might force people not to upgrade to the upcoming official Jelly Bean, as a Jelly Bean kernel can be developed only (if?) when Wiko releases kernel sources for Jelly Bean. So, if you're on one of the unofficial jelly bean ROMs, then you must consider downgrading to ICS if you want to use this kernel, and the benefits that come along.
Here is a list of features that I could understand. A full list of features, including those which bounced over my head, is available in the official thread for the kernel.

Features:

  • Kernel size reduced to 3.2 mb by LZMA compression
  • Overclockable upto 1.4 GHz
  • A total of 12 CPU governors to choose from
  • Performance governor opens up both cores
  • Fsync control by Ezekeel
  • Swap support (Increase ram by using a part of your sd card as virtual ram)
  • USB On-The-Go (OTG) now supports NTFS filesystem
  • Memory pages are erased at the very instant they are freed on, to prevent old information from being passed to new processes.
  • Memcopy and Memmove algorithms have been optimized
  • Vfs cache pressure size is reduced to 20

If any of the above features, or the ones present in the xda thread, went above your head, Google it.
Flashing the ThunderZap kernel on Micromax A110:
Flashing the kernel, which is still in experimental stage, can be risky and you have to blame yourself if anything goes wrong with the device.
  1. If you are on Jelly Bean, downgrade using this guide.
  2. If you don't already have, install clockworkmod recovery.
  3. Download ThunderZap v1.1 (or v1.0) and transfer it to the root (i.e. outside any folders) of your internal or external sdcard.
  4. Power off your phone.
  5. Press Volume up + Volume down + Power button simultaneously tool the screen glows up
  6. Press Volume up to go to clockworkmod recovery.
  7. Using volume up and down buttons to scroll, select "Install zip from sdcard" and select the kernel zip from your sdcard.
  8. After the flashing completes, reboot your phone.
  9. Go to Settings> About to confirm that the kernel was flashed successfully.
Stay tuned for:
- A guide to use the various features of the Thunderzap kernel
- An interview with xda developer Varun Chitre
Enjoy the bunch of new features on your Micromax A110. Share this story using the share buttons below this post to let your friends know about this awesome stuff by varun.chitre15