pine64-pinephone: eg25-manager does not actually recover the modem when it dies

tl;dr: PinePhone users: Does eg25-manager automatically recovery the modem for you? Please post a comment.

---

Describe your issue

When the PinePhone modem dies for any reason (*), eg25-manager is supposed to automatically recover it. I think it even used to do it successfully at some point in the past. But at least for the last six months it hasn't been doing that on my phone. I have had to manually service eg25-manager restart to bring the modem back.

What I have done instead is add a udev rule that runs service eg25-manager restart when the modem USB device disconnects. This has been working 100% reliably for me for the last three months, as in I have observed the modem gone when the phone wakes up from suspend and then a minute later it comes back as eg25-manager finishes restarting. The udev rule is:

# 99-restart-eg25-manager.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="remove", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ENV{PRODUCT}="2c7c/125/318", RUN+="/sbin/rc-service eg25-manager restart"

(udev shouldn't be used for spawning long-lasting processes, but both OpenRC rc-service start and systemd systemctl start will parent the service to the service manager and themselves exit, so that's fine. They do take a few seconds during which udev is blocked and can't process other events, which udev also recommends against, but in this case it's not a big deal IMO.)

Does eg25-manager automatically recovery the modem for any other PinePhone users? If not, and if no one has a better idea, then I will add this rule to device-pine64-pinephone.

(*): For my phone, the common triggers for it dying are:

1. When the phone wakes up from suspend.

2. When an incoming call is disconnected, especially if the disconnect happens very quickly after the call started, which is what happens when phosh-antispam identifies it as spam.

3. When plugging or unplugging from USB power, and plugging or unplugging other USB devices like keyboards from connected dock.

What device are you using?

pine64-pinephone, 1.2b

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?

• from https://images.postmarketos.org
• I built it using pmbootstrap
• It was preinstalled on my device

Additional information

eg25-manager remains running when the modem disconnects and logs nothing.

added device-pine64-pinephone label

changed the description

By Arnav Singh on 2024-03-07T18:43:28

I have two cases.

1. When modem somehow dies completely this is true. It happens like once in two months.
2. When it is only usb connection fail the modem will bounce back in seconds - this happens like once a week and the case is returning from suspend

So I would say that if this does not force modem reboot on usb connection failures then definately win-win solution. If it does force reboot on usb connection failures then there are small downsides but maybe overal it is better than lose out modem totally ?

And if people are using stock firmware then this is kind of must because it will lose modem like 3-5 times a day

By Alaraajavamma on 2024-03-11T20:24:41

changed the description

By Arnav Singh on 2024-03-16T20:25:04

When the PinePhone modem dies for any reason

What exactly does "dies" mean here? As in the modem disappears completely and ModemManager reports that no modems exist? Or just that some/all of the modem's functionality no longer work?

In my case I can only do limited testing since the SIM card in my PP is just a secondary one and not my daily driver, but so far I've noticed that while it seems to be able to pretty reliably wake up and receive calls/SMS from sleep, after the phone is awake for a bit the modem is nowhere near as reliable, as in calls don't work, or SMS messages don't get received, or mobile data doesn't work, or some mixture of those. Otherwise I don't think I've ever seen the modem just vanish completely, other than when restarting eg25-manager.

For example, I was able to call my PP (waking it up from sleep) from my daily driver phone, and I can accept the call, audio works fine, but then a few minutes after I hang up the call from the PP I try using it to call the daily driver phone, and I get an instant disconnect, and in that state it couldn't receive SMS or use mobile data either. Using the cellular enable/disable toggle in Phosh's quick settings menu brought back mobile data, and the SMS I sent earlier showed up, but after I tried placing a call it still disconnected immediately, and that evidently broke mobile data too.

The above scenario has occurred a few times in the past, but only this time I got the idea to try restarting eg25-manager, and that did manage to let me make outgoing calls again, so now I'm wondering if this is the sort of issue you're talking about, or if my problem is different.

For what it's worth I'm using the 0.7.4 open source firmware, and my modem is set up to only use 4G and VoLTE calling since 3G service in my country is all going away sometime later this year.

By Prajna Sariputra on 2024-03-17T15:47:32

What exactly does "dies" mean here? As in the modem disappears completely and ModemManager reports that no modems exist?

Yes.

By Arnav Singh on 2024-03-17T15:47:32

closed

mentioned in commit d67aa6b4

By Arnav Singh on 2024-03-25T14:16:33