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Phone boot-loops when battery is critically low

    • Open Imported Issue created by Administrator @root

    Describe your issue

    What's the expected behaviour?

    When plugging a charger cable, and the phone powers on, it should stay on and charge.

    What's the current behaviour?

    When plugging the charger cable, the phone powers on, but the boot sequence takes more energy that the charger delivers; which causes the OS to detect that the battery level is critically low and not charging, and trigger an emergency shutdown. The phone then restarts automatically because of the charger, and the process starts again endlessly, eating the battery more and more, until the point where the phone automatically reboots as soon as the init sequence starts to take more energy than the charger delivers.

    Note that the charger is capable of delivering 2A at 5V, but the phone will charge at 0.45A when completely idle and screen off - so the threshold seems to be around 2.25 watts.

    How to reproduce your issue?

    Probably with a very old phone that only supports 5V.

    What device are you using?

    device-samsung-i9100

    On what postmarketOS version did you encounter the issue?

    • edge (master branch)

    • v23.12

    • v23.06 (supported until 2024-01-18)

    • I confirm that the issue still is present after running sudo apk upgrade -a

    On what environment did you encounter the issue?

    Environments

    • GNOME Shell on Mobile
    • Phosh
    • Plasma Mobile
    • Sxmo (Wayland/Sway) Please post the output of sxmo_version.sh
    • Other: Please fill out

    How did you get postmarketOS image?

    What's the build date of the image? (in yyyy-mm-dd format)

    2024-02-12

    Additional information

    The workaround is to boot the phone in download mode, which will print a "battery too low" message; but at least the phone will charge (very slowly). Once the battery is above the emergency threshold the OS can boot.

    I believe the only way to really fix this issue is to have a low-power version of what "charging-sdl" was.

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    Activity

    • Administrator
      Administrator @root · Imported
      Author Owner

      So the device does manage to enter the postmarketOS userspace before shutting down?

      By Newbyte on 2024-02-15T11:07:28

    • Administrator
      Administrator @root · Imported
      Author Owner

      I have also encountered this issue with a samsung-gt510 running Phosh. If I let the battery run down low enough, then when I plug the device into a shrimpy 5V usb wall-wart, it boots up automatically and progresses to Phosh lockscreen. But, I guess the stuff still starting up and doing things in the background is enough to then kill the battery. The device shuts off, but promptly boots back up again and continues this boot-loop. I resolve this by holding vol-down (to get lk2nd into fastboot moode) and letting the battery charge a bit more before continuing the boot.

      I also agree with the idea that some kind of charging-sdl successor, which holds the main boot flow until the battery looks healthy enough, is probably the only way to reasonably solve this.

      By Sam Day on 2024-05-17T16:38:46

      Edited by Administrator
    • Administrator
      Administrator @root · Imported
      Author Owner

      Mentioning #1224 so this issue is linked there. If someone with perms could properly add the relationship that'd be super!

      By Sam Day on 2024-05-17T17:01:50

      Edited by Administrator
    • Thorben T.
      Thorben T. @r00t ·
      Contributor

      some notes from me:

      • an alternative fix could be to have the OS shut down the device before the battery drains that low
      • i experienced this even on android (bullhead runnng lineageos), my battery somehow dedgraded to a state where it would be drained too low to even sustain the boot into charging mode (the phone seems to not charge while booting), and i resorted to remove the battery for giving it an initial charge with an external charger whenever that happened.
      • i just posted an MR !6219 (merged) that contains some code to fix a similar issue.
        you might like to use something similar as a fix for yor device,
        or maybe this could even be included in pmos main until charging-sdl is back:
        simply sleep for a bit in the initrd if the battery is critically low, to allow for some charging before the boot.
      • i think this belongs to a class of non-obvious problems caused by not having charging-sdl, together with the one i'm addressing at !6219 (merged)
      Edited by Thorben T.
    • Thorben T. mentioned in issue #1224

      mentioned in issue #1224

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