April 11th, 2023. I’m officially announcing the release of Mint 12.5 Stable.

Mint is a One UI-first custom kernel designed to bring optimized performance and battery life to Samsung Exynos 9610 devices. Mint Kernel has been the kernel of choice for many users as well as custom ROMs, being the default kernel on The Fresh Project's flagship Fresh.

The new Mint 12.5 Stable release introduces several improvements and new features. These include improved performance and stability, better battery life, and better compatibility with newer Android ROMs.

New on Mint 12.5

A Task Scheduler Straight From the Latest Galaxy

One of the major features of Mint 12.5 Stable is the introduction of a new scheduler based on the scheduler used on the latest Galaxy devices. This new scheduler is designed to improve performance and battery life even further, especially in scenarios where many apps are running at the same time.

Mint 12.5 also introduces Task EXpress (TEX) - a feature that prioritizes the app you have running, while keeping background apps on power-saving cores. With Task EXpress, you can enjoy a smoother and more responsive experience, while also extending your battery life.

TEX works by identifying the app that you are currently using and allocating more resources to it. This means that the app will run faster and more smoothly, without being slowed down by other apps running in the background. At the same time, background apps are moved to power-saving cores, where they consume less power and have minimal impact on performance.

A CPU Governor that Adapts to You

Mint 12.2 users have been testing a special version of the schedutil governor that adapts to how you use your device to scale the CPU. With the release of Mint 12.5, this feature is now made official with the introduction of the energy_adaptive CPU governor, codenamed AIGo. This innovative governor is specifically designed to optimize device performance and battery life based on your specific usage habits.

By forecasting your usage patterns and smoothly scaling the CPU frequency to avoid hitches or spikes, AIGo is able to provide a more responsive and efficient experience. With AIGo, you no longer have to constantly tweak settings to get the most out of your device. Instead, the governor learns your usage habits and automatically optimizes performance and battery life for you.

In addition, AIGo provides a smoother and more seamless experience by learning your device usage patterns. This ensures that hitches or spikes in CPU usage are avoided, resulting in a more consistent and reliable experience. Overall, AIGo offers a more intelligent and user-friendly way to optimize device performance and battery life.

AIGo is based on a Samsung patent from 2019, and has gotten its way to be used on certain Exynos and Qualcomm devices. Read the patent filing here.

More New Things in this Release

Merge support for Utilization Clamping (UClamp)
Allow ALPM state to be re-set during doze
Reduce latency while processing G2D ioctls
Memory management has been improved

Get Mint Kernel

Mint 12.5 Stable is now available for download from Mint's official GitHub Releases repository and is available with variants for One UI and AOSP-based ROMs.

Building from source

Mint Kernel's full source code is available on GitHub, with instructions to build on the README. Contributions and issue reports are also welcome!

I would like to extend my gratitude to all the testers, and contributors, as well as to those whose more awesome kernels have made something like Mint possible. All source references are available on Mint's README, as usual.

Announcing Mint 12.5 Stable