With Apple’s switch to ARM, maybe what I’m about to say is a little easier to understand. But the important thing to remember with the L5, is that, unlike any of the current smartphones on the market, it will be running mainline (IE: desktop) Linux. Not a mobile specific OS.
14 hours for a full up computer in your pocket is more than acceptable. I can wake up, unplug it from charging, go to work, use it, and then (assuming I got up at 6 am) as long as I’m home before 8pm, I’ll have made it through an entire day.
Now unlike my laptop or desktop, the L5 is also a phone, with a cellular data connection. It is working with more radios than most laptops or desktops.
I mean if the 14 hours is legit, than I would be one of the people, saying Purism has reached mission accomplished.
That doesn’t mean stop working to improve that, just that, this is a good milestone.
I never doubt about it. But at this point you cannot use it in these 14h. Maybe to check the clock or such little tasks in between it’s okay. No calls, no connection to modem (modem costs around 2h). So i don’t think that’s usable as daily driver right now, but it is close before.
I thought a desktop Linux with great mobile optimization would be not so much difference compared to a mobile specific OS on same hardware. Was I wrong? If so, it could be interesting to use a dual boot system to have something more efficient for daily usage and pureOS for specific use cases.
PureOS is the only desktop Linux distro that is built with the purpose of monitoring several radios and sensors (cell modem, proximity sensor, light sensor, etc) constantly. Its largely uncharted waters for Linux, not so for android and Apple. Mobile optimization is good, but there are things that have to be taken into account that no desktop OS has ever had to worry about.
I don’t think I’m.wording my point very well, but hopefully you see what I mean. And hopefully my deduction comes across as sound.
These features are not new for Linux, there are lots of embedded devices out there doing this but they are usually not based on a desktop distro. So the infrastructure is there, it’s just a matter of putting it all together like all the embedded distros doing the same have done.
I work for a company who has a OpenEmbedded distro and an almost mainline kernel with a device which has a camera, gps, microphone, display, accelerometer, gyro, wifi, bluetooth etc. and the majority of our stack is open source and we upstream as many changes we can upstream to remove having to maintain local patches so we can have up to date packages.
This is interesting. I see it where I work also, that it’s becoming more common in recent yeasr for companies to strive for upstreaming for such reasons. I’ve been wondering what this change means for companies, I think it probably means the value of a company shifting away from lots of closed-source code owned by the company, towards a new situation where the value of a company is more in the competence of its employees and its ability to keep those employees and attract new good ones.
I think this is a good development, even if the FSF would say it is not enough, they want copyleft licenses which the companies don’t care about.
No, it’s the other way around: If you assume the lowest power state for CPU+RAM, then software optimizations rather help you to get closer to that theoretical ideal. A typical software optimization is trying to reduce the times that the CPU has to wake up from it’s sleep state. A bad piece of software would set a timer to every second (or worse: 100 times a second), that would then wake up the idling CPU, ask “is there new data for me?”, get a “no” reply, and thus waste a lot of energy. This is called polling. Whenever possible, polling should be avoided. It’s usually possible, to register for events and then only be woken up if those events happen. (Just a simplifed, general example).
I completely agree. I think the natural step for a company embracing open source is to first start using open source software, the second is to start contributing to open source projects and the third is to open source their own software themselves. I’m happy to see how both the company I work for and others are slowly progressing. I’m also happy to work for a company which previously only pushed open standards to now also start open source some of their code. It’s going slowly, but progress is being made.
I believe that the more companies that follow this path will create a much healthier industry. Not only pushing solutions internal to the company to be better but also show that even competitors can be stronger together and make better products when we all contribute. When people realize that open sourcing is a business advantage is when we will see big progress, but that won’t happen if only a single company is contributing and it’s hard to get competitors to work with you instead of against you even if it’s for the benefit of both.
I think we’re talking past each other. I didn’t spoke about theoretically lowest power state. I spoke about the Librem 5 right now and as far as I know it’s polling isn’t fully avoided yet. Tell me if I’m wrong. Interesting explanation though.
Just got my Pinephone running with PureOS to cover the time until my Librem5 is delivered. So I started getting more interest and did the following to estimate the best standby time:
looked up the datasheets of imx8 and gemalto modem (stated here 2-5mA should be possible in deep sleep)
took the minimal power that theoretically is needed to have the modem respond to calls and wake up the imx8 soc (calculated with 5mA on 3.5V = 0.0175 W?)
took the power of the imx8 soc in deep sleep (0.078W)
Adding up I came to a maximum theoretical standby time of 105 hours on a 2000mAh battery. I’m not an electrical engineer and there is probably some error somewhere (please correct me), but at the moment that seems to be the maximum time the phone would be able to wait for incoming calls or sms with everything else switched off as far as possible by the design of the two needed components. Left out are all other components that might be needed to connect the parts.
P.D. (edit) I’d really use a deep sleep standby if it would be possible since I’m fine if only sms and calls can disturb me. Every other interaction with my phone I prefer to initiate myself ;-). Is deep sleep possible, yet?
True, DRAM is missing… I looked around and found a reference to Micron MT53B384M32D2NP-062, but didn’t get a hold on the power consumption for 3GB in DPD (Deep Power-Down) - if this is the right state to look for.
Does anybody have more insight?
P.D. Don’t know if suspend to disk would come back fast enough to receive a call or SMS in time. Probably depends on the modem. If fast enough, I do not see, what advantage suspend to ram would have for me as a user?
My testing on 5.6-rc4 with mainline ATF seems to suggest that BM818 gets powered off in suspend
It sounds like the Linux drivers for the BLM818 cellular modem don’t work correctly if the modem shuts off when it should go into suspend mode or the BLM818 has some serious problem in the hardware. This should be tested with the software stack that BroadMobi provides, to determine if it is a software issue with the free/open driver used by the Librem 5.
Thanks for this update! HW related relatively simple things are described within the NXP document AN12147: “In cases where the thermal properties cannot be altered, a lower operating voltage can be used to increase the lifetime of the device.” As well, on page 54 from this Embedded Artists document is recognized: “A lower die temperature will result in lower power consumption due to lower leakage current.” And in addition (hardware optimizations): “The i.MX 8M SoC and PMIC together implement DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) and Thermal Throttling. This enables the system to continuously adjust operating frequency and voltage in response to changes in workload and temperature. In general this result in higher performance at lower average power consumption.” Sorry, if bothering again, just couldn’t resist. Is there something wrong with using NXP PF4210 PMIC? Is it L5 Dogwood still using ROHM BD71837MWV or perhaps new BD71837AMWV PMIC?
From what I read in the technical description of the Gemalto modem, it can run entirely on its own and wake up a computer either via usb or via a dedicated connection.
Returning from deep sleep on a Pinephone seems to need less then 2 seconds. I’d suspect that that is good enough to still catch a call (if the wake-up by the modem works).
P.D. wake-up from ‘systemctl suspend’ on pinephone works in PureOS. Compared to an active android phone the ring came about 3-4 seconds later. Fine for me if it would give me that much more standby time.
BTW, did anybody find any information about the power consumption of the ram in deep sleep?
Is there any metrics on which components draws the most power?
I would be interested in underclocking and lowering the voltage of the CPU for more battery life if that made a significant difference. Then maybe clocking it back up to stock speeds when docked once that works would be cool.
Thanks, I’ve just switched to PureOS and you’re having right systemctl suspend works with EG25-G out-of-the-box, as you described. I’ve took and installed 1.2-Community-Edition PureOS image. Direct to eMMC over Jumpdrive microSD, it made me happy, great tool.
I thought a bit more about my use of a smartphone.
I do not need any time critical services like important messages from social networks. I like to have my phone available, be reachable via SMS and calls and have the option to look at stuff (like social networks, forums, whatever) when I decide to take the time.
This leads for me to the question whether the optimization we’re talking about is what I really need and want. I guess I’d be fine if the computer part of the phone would be switched off completely (suspend to disk or even shutdown) and would be woken up the moment I get a call or SMS.
If I’d miss the call due to the wake-up time of the computer part and would find the number of the caller afterwards in my history of calls I’d be fine.
These thoughts rise two questions for me:
Is it possible to wake the imx8-part of the phone by the modem from suspend to disk or even from a shutdown (like wake-on-lan)?
For my use case: Wouldn’t it be a valid design for a phone to have two parts: One dump phone only part that can be used as a modem by a computer and that works completely on its own and another computer part. Both in the same housing.
That’d lead to the situation I have now: A notebook that uses another device to connect to networks, e.g. a phone which can be used as a modem. And a phone which is dump and usable as a modem.
Such a design compared to the librem5 would move some function from the imx8 part to the modem part (calls, sms, driving a (second) display).
The advantage is obvious: I can use the phone without the computer being switched on. The battery runtime of such a phone would in phone only mode would probably be some weeks.
If I switched on the computer part I’d be able to use all functions of the Librem5 (if I don’t miss any possible problem).
If I’d cut off the phone part from the computer I’d have an airgapped computer (at least as long as the connection is cut of between the two parts).
If I’d switch off the phone part completely I could still use the computer part without being logged onto a mobile network at all.
Does anybody know such a project? Wouldn’t it be a possible improvement on the Librem5 general design? Dreaming of a future version with an additional e-ink display for the dump phone (formerly modem) part .
