Red LED indication is on whenever the charging controller receives external power. This, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s getting enough power.
If you turned the phone off while connected to such source, it would actually be charging (although still a bit slowly).
BTW. There’s a fresh patchset that implements BC1.2 handling, which is often used with USB-A sources. It’s not merged yet: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/merge_requests/570
@dos ok i think it is fine how it is- unless we would want to add any condition that results in a no or too slow charging situation to the slow blinking red light (failure to negotiate correct charging voltage, current etc).
Side note the unmerged kernel patch, there is no deb file so i imagine i cant sideload install this patch somehow to test?
As it is right now we don’t really control the red LED as it’s operated by the charger controller itself (although that could change in the future), but with the newest kernel (5.16.19pureos1) the battery icon in phosh and gnome-control-center should actually notice that the battery is getting slowly discharged instead of being charged and hide the bolt sign in that case.
Not sure what you’re talking about regarding debs, the package is there in CI job artifacts: https://source.puri.sm/sebastian.krzyszkowiak/linux-next/-/jobs/388541/artifacts/raw/debian/output/linux-image-5.16.0-1-librem5_5.16.19pureos1+gitlabci1_arm64.deb
ah thanks i was looking at the incorrect aarch archive.
In order to get latest improvement please check the output of: cat /proc/cmdline and download following: https://source.puri.sm/angus.ainslie/uboot-imx/-/jobs/398097/artifacts/raw/debian/output/u-boot-librem5_2022.10-librem5.1_arm64.deb. Switch to download folder and install downloaded package: sudo dpkg -i u-boot-librem5_2022.10-librem5.1_arm64.deb. Now refer to this post:
Finally reboot to complete above change (so you can “gather better information from” there 
).