Status update 2020-12-15

[a-wai]

Hello,

Mid-December is there, and it comes with a number of features and improvements

We've been indeed quite busy during the past month:

• We finally created an on-device installer image, based on the awesome work from our friends at pmOS! This allows you to set the password of your choice instead of the default "1234" and, more importantly, it can be used to enable full disk encryption, which is a feature lots of people have been waiting for
  
• Several patches from megi's kernel were backported to our kernel, including:
  • Display refresh rate fixes (60Hz inside)
    
  • I2C frequency increase (improves the touchscreen response time)
    
  • New driver for the WiFi adapter, bringing more stable connections and improved power management
    
• We introduced a few days ago the 'eg25-manager' package, which is a userspace implementation of megi's power management driver with a few added benefits
  

The latter deserves some explanation, so here it is: while megi's driver is an interesting, I believe it doesn't belong to the kernel space, for various reasons:

• First of all, it is highly unlikely it will ever be upstreamed
  
• It's a convenience driver, which doesn't require any specific kernel-space features or privileges
  
• In addition to handling the modem's GPIOs, it also uses its serial port to send hardcoded AT commands; this limits it to a very device-specific use case, and doesn't allow for easy configuration without recompiling the kernel
  

As I'd prefer removing downstream patches from our kernel over adding some more, I went for a full re-implementation of this driver in userspace. While giving eg25-manager the same capabilities (management of modem GPIOs for power-on/off and suspend/resume sequences, power state monitoring for faster shutdown, initial configuration using AT commands) as megi's driver, it brings in some additional benefits:
First, eg25-manager monitors ModemManager, so it can stay aware of the modem state (acquired by MM, SIM unlocked or not, registered, data connected...). This allows us, for instance, to release the URC (call or SMS notification) cache only once the modem has been acquired by ModemManager after resuming from sleep. It is also possible, that way, to quickly (< 10s) detect that ModemManager fails to bring the modem back online in a reasonable time, and therefore recover the modem from a broken resume state. You'll probably still miss a few calls, but shouldn't have to reboot your phone anymore after a bad suspend/resume cycle (based on the 'mguard' script by @as400).

The PineTab obviously benefits from the kernel upgrade as well, and it even has its own installer image, in case you want full disk encryption on this device too!

Today's images are our new reference releases for both the PinePhone and PineTab.

Enjoy