samsung-i9300: Regarding alleged hardware failure with mainline
This isn't so much an issue as a report and followup on !2229 (merged) with the goal of figuring out how to best handle this situation. It is a long post, but I feel I should add as much context as possible to help figuring out what the best approach is here.
Background: Some time ago I tried out postmarketOS with the mainline kernel on my i9300. After playing some Animatch and chatting with Telegram Desktop the phone started behaving strangely, with the screen flickering and turning off whenever I opened a new app. I turned the phone off in fear that something would happen to it, and following that it would just shut down when I booted into Phosh, and it wouldn't turn on unless I plugged in a power cable, and even then I just got stuck in charging-sdl. I decided to shrug it off as the phone dying from being old.
Today I ended up chatting with Nergzd723 about this and he mentioned he had experienced similar things when using the mainline kernel, so we concluded it could be the mainline kernel causing hardware failure. However, while his phone could boot fine but had a seemingly permanently wrecked panel, mine just wouldn't boot unless I plugged in a charger.
What I didn't think of was testing a different battery.
Following Nergzd723 saying that what I experienced sounded like a dead battery I dug up the original battery and used that instead of the aftermarket one I used in the phone, and lo and behold it started up and ran Glacier as fine as Glacier ever runs.
In other words, it seems my phone had no permanent damage and the panel issues I experienced were temporary, and the rest was caused by a bad battery. However, it is nevertheless strange that this happens just when I install pmOS on it. Previously, it had been used on a daily basis by a relative of mine to make and receive calls, and it worked just fine. It was when I put pmOS on it and started using it like that when the battery seemingly decided to die. There is also the matter of Nergzd723's panel/screen which still seems dead from what I understand.
Where I want to get with this long post is: Can we trust the mainline kernel on this device? While my device seems fine now (I didn't use it for very long though), it is a strange coincidence that the battery (and panel) would start acting up just when I started using pmOS on the device. And, again, Nergzd723's panel seems permanently failed. Could it be that the mainline kernel does something wrong in regards to how it manages power on this device, or were we just unlucky? Could it be that the mainline kernel is unable to charge the device, like samsung-skomer, and thus my issues wouldn't go away even if I let it charge (with mainline) for a while? Thoughts?
cc: @grimler @nergzd723