Pinebook Pro freezes when running on battery

[petaramesh]

Hi,

I have a recent Pinebook Pro from September 2022 (motherboard bears a 2022/07 QC sticker)

It has an NVME (low power WD) SSD for /home and data only, and Manjaro Linux KDE runs from the eMMC, with latest updates applied.

When running from mains power, the system is perfectly stable. But the power cable is so short !

OTOH when running on battery, even fully charged, it happens very often (twice attempting to write this post) that the system completely freezes with the power LED blinking red/green.

At this point I can only perform a hardware poweroff.

Any clue ?

Kind regards.

[steeb]

I have a very similar setup, but with the NVMe as the root drive and the eMMC just as extra storage. Low-power WD SSD, Manjaro, KDE -- all the same. I mostly run on battery, even, and have never had this fault.

I can tell you that typically the red-green flashing indicates a kernel panic, so you may be able to check dmesg to see if there's any particular module that is failing.

[petaramesh]

I can tell you that typically the red-green flashing indicates a kernel panic, so you may be able to check dmesg to see if there's any particular module that is failing.

Well a kernel panic is something so brutal that the system doesn't get a chance to log anything to disk when it happens... It just stops.

[KC9UDX]

I don't know Linux very well but does it output something to the serial console when that happens?

[steeb]

I can tell you that typically the red-green flashing indicates a kernel panic, so you may be able to check dmesg to see if there's any particular module that is failing.

Well a kernel panic is something so brutal that the system doesn't get a chance to log anything to disk when it happens... It just stops.

If you don't think there's anything useful about seeing exactly what was happening at the time of the kernel panic, then all I'll do is wish you good luck. Thanks for the education, though.

[petaramesh]

It appears that setting the NVMe to maximum power state PS2 fixed the issue, as far as I can tell.