CPUIDLE not working on PinePhone

ARM
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Hello Varikonniemi,

I cannot speak for Manjaro ARM, but I surely can speak for myself, in the sense that I haven’t abandoned anything, and especially not the PinePhone. When it comes to the original CPUIDLE issue, the proper way for resolving it has turned out to be highly complex, requiring even brand-new concepts to be introduced in TF-A and U-Boot, and many things I’ve done and upstreamed so far have served as various kinds of preparations for that. It might look different, I know, but I wish if things were less complicated.

I fully understand your frustration, if that helps, and I’m unable to put a date on the patches that will resolve the original CPUIDLE issue properly, but I can assure you that the day will eventually come.

To clarify it a bit further, Manjaro ARM hasn’t sold you anything, it’s Pine64 (more precisely, Pine Store) that makes and sells PinePhones, while the entire software support is based entirely on contributions from the wider Pine64 community, to which I belong. Consequently, while I can still speak for myself only, it’s fortunate that the community is still working on it, and it might be good if you’d consider looking at the things from that perspecitve.

To sum it up, please don’t feel defeated and please don’t give up. I haven’t given up on the PinePhone and I don’t intend to, but your support would certainly mean a lot to me. :slight_smile:

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126

So why are there phones out there with manjaro logo on them?

And i am not accusing you of this dropping of support, but manjaro, i have not received any updates to the phone for half a year at least and it can only be considered as unsafe to use because of that.

Just wanted to let you know that even when i previously promised to debug the issue, it’s no longer relevant because of the hardware falling apart faster than we got around to the debugging. (even when i purchased 3,5mm stereo pins just for this.)

It’s just sad, that a Linux phone got obsoleted faster than current Android™ phones, when the whole point with Linux phones was that we are not dependent on android vendors.

Turns out we were dependent on Pine vendors who did not even put in the effort of Android vendors!

It would be easy if pinephone was made supported by the Linux kernel, then any distro could be used.

But for some reason, maybe egoistical and capturing a market, things were not upstreamed. We got a ■■■■■■■ of hacky cludges, that then were discontinued when it was not trendy any longer. And now pinephone users are left with actually engineering proper solutions, when most don’t use this “legacy” hardware any longer.

Bait & switch, just like any android vendors historically. But today, there is 6/7 years of support which is infinitely better and cannot be called that any longer.

And as i asked previously, for some reason the button to close topic has vanished, so i need to ask the overlords to close it, i think it has served it’s purpose, Pinephone selling and support was just marketing ■■■■■■■■ when there was no intention to follow it through, opportunist ■■■■■

Mod edit:- @varikonniemi – Three consecutive posts have been merged into one. This is not the first time. Please learn how to edit your post to add more content, rather than creating a new post each time you have an afterthought. Thanks.

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Hello Varikonniemi,

Regarding the Manjaro ARM logo on the PinePhone back cover, it was an initiative from the Pine Store to raise some money and forward it to the respective Linux distributions. That was known as “Manjaro ARM” edition, and there were also postmarketOS and Mobian editions. Maybe there was one more such edition, which I may have forgotten, and each of the editions ended up providing some money to the respective Linux distribution.

Regarding the upstreaming of various PinePhone patches, I fully agree with you and your frustration, and my goal is to have everything related to the PinePhone upstreamed to the Linux kernel and U-Boot. I’m working on a few patches as I’m writing this, but it all takes a lot of time and effort.

Actually, I’d prefer if you wouldn’t close this thread, and if it helps, please be aware that I fully understand your frustration. Just have some faith and some more patience, please… Not closing this thread would actually serve as some kind of moral support to all my efforts. :slight_smile:

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If you only knew the time and effort i put into making the pinephone a viable tool, (for instance i made the first guide to run a bitcoin and lightning server on it’s UPS battery and dual internet, normally 10k server hardware tier.), just to be dropped upstream support and abandoned like the ■■■■■■■■■ chinese vendor would do,

edit: as you also admitted, manjaro got money from selling manjaro pinephones, and then thought it’s ok to drop support so soon.

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I think that was more of a community service thing Pine64 did. Getting branded hardware out there provides visibility to community projects such as Manjaro.

Generally Pine64 products receive fairly minimal support from the vendor and pretty much all work is left up to the community. I believe Pine64 make that pretty clear.

Frankly it’s pretty amazing that the development has gotten this far. I use my Pinephone with PostmarketOS as my daily driver.

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132

Varikonniemi,

I certainly canot speak for Manjaro ARM, but I surely haven’t abandoned the PinePhone. As I wrote above, my goal is to have all Linux kernel and U-Boot patches upstreamed eventually, but that requires a lot of time and effort, because many, if not nearly all, currently existing patches require a major rework to be acceptable upstream.

Please note that a couple of other people are also working on upstreaming various PinePhone patches. For example, support for the Realtek RTL8723CS WiFi has been upstreamed recently and followed up with a few bugfixes, and upstreaming complete support for the STK3310 proximity sensor is currently under way. Those are both very important achievements, especially the support for RTL8723CS.

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133

I’m not an expert by far but I think Pine64 are also fairly limited in terms of what hardware they choose to ship. The RTL8723CS WiFi was somewhat hellish to get working IIRC and I doubt they picked a difficult to upstream chip on purpose.

The Pinetab 2 has a similar situation with the BES2600.

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Yes, there are various limitation when it comes to selecting hardware components. For example, sometimes it simply isn’t possible to source some components in relatively small quantities that Pine64 needs for its devices, so some compromises may be unavoidable.

Oh, I fully understand it… Despite the recent situation with Manjaro ARM being far from optimal, the amount of your effort that has already gone into the PinePhone is, IMHO, what should be one of the deciding factors for you to actually not give up on it.

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135

@varikonniemi Honestly I’m not sure where you’re getting your info - nothing has been abandoned.

The speed of development might be slowing down but I think that’s because everything pretty much works and getting things from “hacky but works” to “upstreamed in the Linux kernel” is a lot of effort that effectively doesn’t provide much value to end users. In a lot of cases an end-user probably wouldn’t even notice anything changed.

The other factor is that the Pinephone’s SoC is old. It was released in 2015 - 10 years at this point.

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Oh, that will actually provide a lot of indirect, long-term value fo the end users, by preventing the PinePhone from becoming obsolete over time.

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Oh yea, I’m aware of that. I meant more in the sense that the work isn’t nearly as “visible” to an inexperienced user.

But maybe that wasn’t quite right since having the device working for much longer is arguably still pretty visible.

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Indeed, the actual effects will be directly visible to the less experienced users only after a while, i.e. in a few years from now. Though, not having the device working after a few years would be the worst way to see the negative effects of the opposite outcome, and a real failure. :confused:

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139

Compatible replacement batteries can be had for less than 20€, though, since the matching Samsung model is now 10 years old (Galaxy J7 (2015)), it is going to be harder and harder to find those batteries, unless one of the third-party manufacturers starts rebranding them for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro specifically. (Some of the built-to-order screen protector manufacturers do that now.)

As for getting software updates, if you need a stable distribution with updates, you will probably have to switch to another distribution (e.g., postmarketOS or Mobian). Alternatively, you can try switching to the unstable branch of Manjaro. Though I would not be surprised if the upgrade fails, because so much has changed since the last stable update push. Neither the Arch nor the Manjaro processes are designed to deal with several months between updates.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Why are consecutive posts merged by Moderation staff?

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I won’t be spending 20 euros on a phone that last received updates a year ago. It’s simply not usable even for the server use i posted about earlier, as it’s vulnerable from a security perspective.

The other issues like there has not been achieved a stable interaction with the modem are secondary, and not really on the responsibility of manjaro. But keeping up with package updates is certainly something you signed up for when you made a manjaro branded version.

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It’s really unfortunate that Manjaro ARM has basically stopped providing package updates, but again, you can always switch to another Linux distribution, to keep your PinePhone functional.

Maybe (and hopefully) Manjaro ARM will become engaged again with the PinePhone once the majority of the kernel patches are upstreamed. Again, I cannot speak for Manjaro ARM, I speak for myself only.

EDIT: I’m adding my “usual” update on my patches accepted upstream below, because posting consecutive replies is not allowed to people who just participate in threads started by other people.

I’m happy to report that one more of my Linux kernel patches has been accepted upstream, as listed below, while a few more Linux kernel patches are currently under review or on their way to the mailing lists:

Also, one more of my U-Boot patches has been accepted upstream, while a few more U-Boot patches are currently on their way to the mailing list:

I’ll keep updating this post as more patches become accepted upstream.

2 Likes