Experimental Mobian kernel patch for extended battery life

[teekay]

I'm currently testing a #Mobian kernel patch to improve battery life on the #PinephonePro and it's looking promising (about 3 hours of continuous use instead of 1 hour). If you'd like to try it out, assuming you are running Mobian, download the linked deb file onto your phone, install it, then shutdown your phone and remove battery, wait 10 minutes (to reset the battery meter), then boot into the new kernel. I recommend using this with Megi's uboot bootloader as you can then choose which kernel to boot into (6.16 is my patched one, 6.12 is the current Mobian one).

Note that suspend doesn't work in this kernel, I am looking into this. One additional bonus with this kernel is that if you uninstall the default Camera app, then install Camera from Flathub, it should work fine with both front and back cameras, you can take photos and scan QR codes and the image is not inverted on the back camera.

Let me know if you try it out.

https://cloud.nextcloudhosting.co.za/ind...7G4X6NGY8w

[Kevin Kofler]

What exactly does this do to improve battery life? Where is the source code?

[teekay]

What exactly does this do to improve battery life? Where is the source code?

It uses a "raw" state-of-charge value for the battery percentage, rather than the "smoothing algorithm" the battery driver uses, which I have discovered is flawed. See the README.md file in the linked folder for the patch and how to apply it, it's literally just a one character patch. Today I've added another patch to fix the suspend issue, so that automatic suspend now works again. I have been testing this and it's made a huge difference in battery life, making the PPP a daily drive-able phone for me! The battery issues were the only thing stopping me from switching from my Android to the PPP.

[benpocalypse]

This rules. Thank you so much for doing this. I had been using my Pinephone Pro with the keyboard case to extend the battery life, but this change makes it easy to run it without the case. I really hope this ends up making it into the mainline kernel.

[biketool]

Nice .deb install and all, we are in testing mode now, just need to charge to 100% and we can see how well this works.

[teekay]

This rules. Thank you so much for doing this. I had been using my Pinephone Pro with the keyboard case to extend the battery life, but this change makes it easy to run it without the case. I really hope this ends up making it into the mainline kernel.

Thanks for the feedback, this helps in terms of motivating upstreaming it 

[biketool]

I installed the kernel today, rebooted, left it to charge.
I tried running a 720p x264 movie, I can find a bit of warm over the CPU and am down to 75% after maybe 20 min.
I feel like we need some good benchmarks and tests to run, CPU vs GPU(there is even an included 'AI accelerator' (3.0 TOPS Neural Processing Unit) core in the rockchip package).
have you done any research on how the throttling and CPU core cascading sleep scripts run?
I wish we had the whole Nokia Maemo Linux team around to consult like we did back in the Linux N series days.
is there an established way to calibrate the battery?

[teekay]

I'm not aware of a way to calibrate, other than to remove the battery for 10 minutes to reset the battery meter. You can compare what you would've seen battery percentage-wise previously by running this command:

Code:

sudo dmesg|grep "rk818-bat: changed"

Look for "dsoc=" value which is what you would have seen as battery percentage before this patch, and "rsoc=" which is what you currently see.

[Jite]

Hi, just wondering if you have added the usb audio to display out via usb c to your kernel. I was thinking of putting mobian trixie onto the emmc on the ppp and trying out your new kernel this weekend...

[teekay]

Hi, just wondering if you have added the usb audio to display out via usb c to your kernel. I was thinking of putting mobian trixie onto the emmc on the ppp and trying out your new kernel this weekend...

I tried adding the USB-C audio patch, but it didn't work. I could see a new dp-sound device in alsamixer, but nothing showed up in the Sound settings so I couldn't select it to send the audio out to HDMI. So I have not included this patch for now.