Suspended status and battery

[antonis]

Good question. A few updates back my L5 was waking up from suspend with an incoming call after the 4rth ring and was recieving the call even with this delay. Now it just wakes up but it does not receive the call (it does not ring, there is no incoming call).

[JR-Fi]

It just so happens, today there was an idea for a new power management concept: https://xkcd.com/2680/

[MV71]

… I don’t know for others. But for me is quite impossible to use in as a ‘normal phone’ with this fundamental problem. I’m not able to reach the end of the day and this with all connection off (4g, wi-fi. bluetooth…).
I’m not a technician or a software developer but after years without a solution, I’m asking if it’ll be one one day or somethnig was not consider correctly from the beginning… and so: no solutions to the problem.
Doing a comparison with a phone with Ubuntu Touch, note that also in this case activating the phone takes time when unlocking the display. But no problems at all for calls (in and out) and battery consumption. I’m using them since 2015…

[MV71]

…after years this situation is frustrating… It seems that they can not make work all the beautiful ideas behind the project

[antonis]

You are right. It is frustrating. And even more when people write (10 days ago) here:

Status of Suspend for Librem 5

I tried the suspend mode yesterday. 5 and 15 minutes in battery mode and 1h on power supply. None of them worked. It didn’t awake on pressing the on button nor when receiving a SMS.

that there seems to be no progress at all and no-one answers. I think that Purism must bring this issue to be No1 priority. After all it is supposed to be a phone…

[2disbetter]

For me suspend has been working quite well but I don’t care about the phone waking because if the modem.

I would prefer much more stable cellular radio activity though. There are geographic places I can go and the radio is great but other places where it will keep dropping the signal.

Also in power settings if you tell gnome to not cut power to mobile it will disable the modem. When you re-enable the modem it re-enables the power setting.

Sometimes I think might be one reason why the modem constantly is dropping. Then again in my hotel the L5 has been rock solid on strong and stable cellular data. I don’t know what the deal is. Possibly because I enabled VoLTE.

[antonis]

@2disbetter

Also in power settings if you tell gnome to not cut power to mobile it will disable the modem. When you re-enable the modem it re-enables the power setting.

I do not understand this. Can you explain?

How did you enable VoLTE? With AT commands or it is in the interface?

[2disbetter]

Hi, under power settings there are options to all the gnome to cut power to thing like wifi, bluetooth and mobile. You’ll find that this setting is always enabled for mobile. If you try to disable it here it will disable the modem as well. If you go then into mobile settings and try to re-enable it, you’ll find that as soon as you enable mobile, it will re-enable the settings under power. Does that make sense?

@antonis

How did you enable VoLTE? With AT commands or it is in the interface?

I am using a somewhat experimental application for enabling VoLTE and testing if it functioning or enabled during an actual call. BM8`8 VoLTE and BM818 Check respectively. They actually seem to work, but my modem is kind of iffy, in general.

[prog-amateur]

@antonis

I think that Purism must bring this issue to be No1 priority. After all it is supposed to be a phone

I fully agree with this. A phone must be able to hold (at least) 24 hours after some communications, web and video consultation. These are not the requirements of a Galaxy S23, nor of an iphone 14: this is the basis of phones of about 10 years.

I reopened the subject about 10 days ago because I thought it was necessary to know more after 2 months without update. But I didn’t get any answer, I’m very worried.

As a reminder, here are the Top 5 of Fund you apps from about 2 years ago:

Given the past years, I think we are entitled to ask for a clear progression on this point.

[Pirate_Praveen]

This is the daily ritual I have been following,

1. Keep the phone charged during most of the day (I use wireless tethering most of the time so my battery use is probably higher than most people need)
2. Manually suspend the phone at night.
3. Wake the phone up by pressing power button every morning. If there was any SMS, the phone would wake up and receive SMS. It will wake up on first call, but we can’t pick up the first call while it is in suspend. A second call after the phone woke up we can pick. I have 40-60% battery left in the morning. Connect phone to charger. I have charger in my car and I have a power bank for traveling.
4. Sometimes we need to reboot the phone if wifi tethering keeps breaking.

Additionally adding https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/issues/425#note_205637 seems to reduce the number of usb resets and modem vanishing.

Even with this, sometimes I notice the modem has vanished, so I have to manually reset the modem using https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/issues/303#note_181004 (this could be automated, but seems not a priority for Purism right now).

With a bit of effort I use it as my primary phone though losing some calls at times. I do have an android phone as backup in case I’m not reachable on my Librem 5.

[MV71]

Hi Pirate, good for you if this is enough.
But this is not a normal way to use a phone and how a cell phone normally should work.
The situation is sad : there has been no clear improvement in energy consumption since the beginning. An energy consumption that does not allow the phone to work for over 24 hours and at least a couple of days is simply unacceptable in particular because we are all waiting since long time: years. And technically, also with a couple of batteries you’ll burn them really quickly.
This has nothing to do with polemics but with the reality: money spent, years in waiting to receive the phone, other patience and no improvements in fundamentals operations. Months ago I thought of buying others L5 for my family. Now sincerely no longer…

[Pirate_Praveen]

I’m not suggesting this is enough or sufficient. I just shared how I manage to use this phone. It is a bit frustrating, not doubt, but there is indeed some progress, though not to the level we want. A few months ago, the phone simply won’t wake up from a suspend at all, so even with these efforts it was impossible, so I do see it as progress. Now we can actually receive SMS messages while phone is in suspend mode. I’m sure it will get fixed, though it can take quite some time as probably there is just one engineer working on the kernel and they have to work on other things like mainlining drivers while working on suspend.

[Pirate_Praveen]

This seems to be fixed now as per a comment from Angus in the matrix group,

One of the main issues in that thread seems to be not picking up the call waking from suspend. That has been solved now it just needs to make into the MM we use on the phone.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/issues/626
https://source.puri.sm/angus.ainslie/ModemManager/-/commit/afe89e7e7276be7b71c30d3d1eb0f66215d66c10

[Pirate_Praveen]

I have just tested the fix using the debs produced by ci and it works! Now the phone can take up calls after waking up from suspend and this will allow us to enable automatic suspend and extend batter life greatly.

For the impatient, the debs are at https://source.puri.sm/evangelos.tzaras/ModemManager/-/jobs/398243/artifacts/browse/debian/output/

[Quarnero]

@MV71

… I don’t know for others.

20000 mAh power bank will allow you to run Librem 5 for cca. two days (and nights). As described here (over 1A USB-A port/output with USB-DCP/BC1.2 protocol only):

@Quarnero

As sbsmobile shows us here: https://www.sbsmobile.com/ita/198250-thickbox_default/fast-charge-powerbank-20000-mah-2-usbs.jpg. 20000mAh one with the USB 1A port integrated (+ USB-C input) is available for purchase as well, car chargers … (might buy one to proof that, but I do not plan to do this any time soon).

Link to tempting 10000 mAh power bank option is here as well just while and as described within this thread:

@Hristo

I had to use the Librem 5 as a WiFi hotspot for a couple of days so I left it non-stop “charging”.
The phone gets warm until the battery reaches 100% and then it cools down.

After the battery reaches 100% the red LED light turns/stays off. Just kindly recommending to you another approach. Also, both of above mentioned power banks are just about what Librem 5 actually needs: 5V only ones.

EDIT: I’m currently using 18000 mAh power bank from Sitecom:

EDIT II: https://convert-formula.com/mah-hours calculates for 20000mAh power bank and current output (from it) of 0.21A over 90 hours of usage (but probably several hours less, depends on continuous, to power bank, connected usage).

[Selendis]

@Quarnero Are you using a case? If so, link please?

[Quarnero]

Please visit this thread (only one piece made for myself), and if you are about to order one from this material, up to provided .STL file(s) please order additional one for myself:

@Quarnero

This rubbery case is described here (just about right one, as still non-tacky one, or rather I’d categorize as non-tacky one, for sure), please read about which material used:

And therefore still about to use, put some(thing) together:

@Quarnero

Until I move myself to make my own case here is 1mm layer

And sorry, as you can read now (between lines), no I do not have any direct link.

[prog-amateur]

Could you please roughly evaluate your autonomy since the Purism fix ? Thank you

[Pirate_Praveen]

There is still https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/1623 which forces me to turn off and turn on automatic suspend when I have to start/stop a wifi hotspot. But I have been able to enable automatic suspend when I don’t use a hotspot. 5-6 times I tested successfully the phone could wake up and rings when an incoming call comes. One time I did not see the call ringing after wake up, but after a reboot, things were working again. So the situation has improved considerably though it may not be 100% reliable yet.

[carlosgonz]

@MV71

Hello everyone;
is there anyone who knows if there are any improvements to the suspension status management coming soon?
I followed some message exchanges, but til now I didn’t notice any improvement on the phone with updates. When can we expect to finally see a marked improvement, with the Librem 5 finally becoming functional for more than a day?
Thanks to all.

There are already a thread for the same, why create another?

Status of Suspend for Librem 5

Continuing the discussion from It's a burning phone: Anyone aware of any rumors or updates on suspend for Librem 5? My understanding is that this will help significantly for standby battery life of the L5. Perhaps there is a gitlab issue already? It seems like it has been several months since I have heard of any change. I remember that Purism clarified that they would focus on the “active” battery life first, so maybe there has been no further work done on this?