Voodoo Lag Fix for Samsung Galaxy S

Another quick one for this evening.

The stock installation on the Samsung Galaxy S does suffer from lag and there have been a number of fixes that have gone some way to treat the symptoms but not the cause of the problem. Having said that, solutions such as “one click lag fix” in the Google Market have done the job until a more fundamental solution has been developed.

So what’s the solution?

The Voodoo lag fix does exactly what it says, it solves the lag problem on the Samsung Galaxy S. What is interesting is how the fix actually works. The Samsung Galaxy S seems to have a number of partitions in its internal flash memory that use a file system known as RFS (not to be confused with ReiserFS). RFS (Robust FAT File System) is a Samsung developed file system designed for NAND flash memory. It aims to provide a journaling function (i.e. a log of all changes made to the file system) whilst preserving the speed of a FAT (file allocation table) file system.

Unfortunately, RFS seems to have some buffering problems out of the box on the Samsung Galaxy S. Solutions such as the “one click lag fix” do attempt to fix the problem by buffering on to an intermediate filesystem such as EXT2 but it’s not a holistic solution by any means.

The Voodoo lag fix differs in that it converts the RFS file systems in the device to EXT4 and also patches the kernel so it can natively support the file system. This is important as if you change the file system without the operating system kernel being able to access the file system then you can end up bricking your device. Also, before you upgrade your operating system on your device, you need to remove the Voodoo lag fix otherwise you will end up in the same situation (i.e. operating system unable to boot from the partitions).

Another word of warning, make sure you have your phone fully charged or on charge when you apply the fix as stopping in the middle of file system conversions are often bad news.

You can download the Voodoo lag fix from here and installation instructions are also available here (which basically oulines the update.zip method for the veterans amongst us). You’ll also have a neat robotic voice telling what stage the fix is up to upon reboot to reassure you that it is doing stuff (and not to pull out the battery whilst you are running the fix). Depending how much data you have, it might take only take two minutes to complete but will be longer if you have heaps of data.

Check it out and if you don’t feel confident, don’t do it – ask first!