Does tow-boot allow periodic wake from suspension to check for notifications?

[DrPlamsa]

Last time I was using my PP intensively was August of 2021. At that time, I wanted to get the PP to mostly be suspended, but every 10 min or so, wake up and check for notifications (emails, Matrix messages, Signals, etc.). I did manage to get it to do that (and so finally got a comfortable day's battery life out of it [EDIT 2022/05/25 while still getting notifications in a timely manner]), but you'll see that it is a labor intensive hack to implement. Here's my thread on that: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14564

I've been waiting for a better-implementation of this functionality to come around. Has it? Does tow-boot do this now? I see good things, but the forum posts and docs don't specifically address this question.

So, what's the verdict? Does Mobian on the PP now periodically wake up to check for notifications? (It already did this for texts, via CRUST. I'm looking for general functionality; not just texts but emails and all other messages)

Thank you!

[israel]

Last time I was using my PP intensively was August of 2021. At that time, I wanted to get the PP to mostly be suspended, but every 10 min or so, wake up and check for notifications (emails, Matrix messages, Signals, etc.). I did manage to get it to do that (and so finally got a comfortable day's battery life out of it), but you'll see that it is a labor intensive hack to implement. Here's my thread on that: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14564

I've been waiting for a better-implementation of this functionality to come around. Has it? Does tow-boot do this now? I see good things, but the forum posts and docs don't specifically address this question.

So, what's the verdict? Does Mobian on the PP now periodically wake up to check for notifications? (It already did this for texts, via CRUST. I'm looking for general functionality; not just texts but emails and all other messages)

Thank you!

I know there are still some glitches in the KDE Plasma + Manjaro version, but I think I got about a full day out of it. Have used the Manjaro + Phosh a bit as well, but I think Plasma is getting better under-the-hood.  I could be wrong about it, since I have done no benchmark testing.  I have been using my pinephone as my DD since the original convergence package.  It definitely works much better and has much more functionality and much better battery life.  I do think the Plasma version is the focus of the Pinephone specifically, so Plasma + Manjaro may be more tuned to the PP.  Of course I am no regular smartphone user, and do not do much other than text and call with the occasional web-browser while I'm out moment, so your requirements might be entirely different.  i do notice that calls significantly drain the battery, though it seems plasma has gotten much better at this aspect in the recent dev releases.  I am running the "dev" version from github, btw, so that could be a factor since it uses kde-dev repos...
I suggest testing it yourself to see, if you do not use the phone extensively.

Side question, do you need an alternate Android/iPhone to get signal to work on the phone?

[wibble]

Text messages are a bit different - the modem wakes the phone when they are received, so there's no need to poll. Periodic wakes have nothing to do with tow-boot (or any other bootloader) AFAIK, since the system is already booted. Wakes on RTC time can be scheduled, but mostly aren't at the moment. Something in the suspend process needs to be aware of when the phone next needs to wake (for alarm, polling stuff or whatever) and set the next wake time before the suspend happens. Once woken anything that needs to poll actually needs to do so without undue delay, while avoiding slowing things down if the phone has woken for a phone call, so there needs to be some awareness of the wake reason. Finally the suspending daemon needs to be aware of this and suspend again quickly once everything has been polled rather than waiting for a normal suspend timeout. So far as I know we have no APIs for any of this, or daemons that implement it.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/kailueke/wake-mobile is a proof of concept for the RTC wakes, and Birdie has taken the idea a bit further.

PmOS has an experimental daemon that can be used to schedule wakes, and patches to gnome-clocks so that wakes get set for alarms.
https://gitlab.com/seath1/waked
https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/...s?h=master

https://github.com/vkraven/rtcsyncwake-pinephone is something broadly similar with a kde leaning.

It's possible one of these could form the basis of something more general, but this will need work convincing various upstream projects to go with it if it's to be of any real use. You're either going to need apps to be aware of the API, or have a way that a separate daemon can prod them to poll, and be notified when they're done.

[DrPlamsa]

@wibble Thanks for answering my question (that tow-boot has nothing to do with this), and *extra thanks* for the list of current projects and the additional outline of what a full implementation of such a thing would look like!

It certainly looks like "waked" would be the best option, if it were to receive widespread adoption.

As I mentioned, I did get a hackish version to work last August using systemd timers, see here: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14564 I am pleased to see it getting support by serious developers.

[DrPlamsa]

I've done some more asking around and summarized the latest results here: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid115212