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Comment by megous | Hacker News Reader

Sad not to be mentioned, despite the update talking about a lot of my independent work last month or so. (discovering the HW issues, suggesting/verifying the fix, writing the USB-C/HDMI driver enabling the whole convergence thing) But I'm very glad about the progress PinePhone is making. The momentum is incredible.

If anyone is interested in original info from the author of the USB-C/HDMI work, I also put useful information/observations from my work on the kernel and PinePhone here:

https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html

The current thing on my radar is writing a power manager for the modem. :) That will improve the standby from 24h with the modem active to ~90h.

EDIT: All is well, btw. There's just a lot of pressure on pine64's small team, and it's hard to keep up with everything.

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Just as everyone else has said, I just want you to know that I appreciate your hard and well documented work.

As a late-but-early adopter of other phone projects the thankless work that you do is what allows adopters like me to even get started. Thank you.

Booting to Arch Linux and being accessible on WiFi in ~5 seconds

Booting to my custom init process, initializing the system and running my UI app in ~1 second

Try that with any other smartphone...

Yeah, I've improved it a bit with UI in the bootloader (still fits in 32KiB sram, even with GUI) + flickerless/seamless display pipeline passover to the kernel in the meantime too. :)

I've also experimented with booting to electron and having the whole phone UI written in it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce9vZj1r_-E

shouldn't electron UI then eat up much of the battery gains made from the modem code?

Probably not. Electron just sits there doing not much other than 2-3% CPU load from updating the information in the header each second.

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/a1017dd38ca6ce10.png

Batter gains in standby are something else. Main CPU is off, and no processes are thus running, so it doesn't matter what SW you have, for those gains.

"Any other" is rather too strong, as same could be (and was) done on devices like Openmoko phones, Nokia N900, GTA04 and now on the Librem 5 as well.

But yeah, this category of smartphones definitely is something special :)

I'd be interested in seeing Librem booting that quickly. Any videos? :)

I'm not so sure about booting into custom init in <= 1sec since nobody really looked into optimizing the boot process that much yet, but Arch in 5 secs should be easily achievable since booting Jumpdrive on Librem 5 with regular u-boot takes about 5-6 seconds already with no effort put into booting speed whatsoever. Just getting rid of initrd would already shave quite a lot of time.

Librem 5 has a slightly faster CPU, more than twice as fast RAM and pretty much the same eMMC speed as the PinePhone. Boot times should generally be similar, with Librem 5 slightly winning, and that matches my observations so far with similar distros running on both devices.

No videos yet though, I may record some in the future :)

"All the current PP variants (1.0–1.2) have a major issue, that prevents CC pins from working correctly. It's therefore not possible to perform any kind of negotiation and communication over the CC pins. It's not fixable in SW, other than via a manual selection of power and data roles by the user. There's a HW mod that you can do to fix CC pins from being hogged by the VCONN switches by removing the switches."

It's a pity this requires tricky surface mount rework.

Not necesarily. I've read someone just pulled those two switches off the board with a screwdriver stuck in between them and twisting.

Thankfully, just removing the switches will fix CC pins and PP will be able to work with many USB-C peripherals after that.

I have two pinephones that work nicely with two different USB-C docks and an USB-C 4x USB-A adapter just with this fix.

There are probably not that many interesting peripherals/cables that would benefit from supplying power over CC pins. (which just removing the switches makes impossible) A lot of peripherals will make do with VBUS power.

Thank you for your great work.

Is it possible to manually configure the port to work with HDMI or as a host (in sysfs), or is the hardware change required (on preorder/braveheart phone)?

Is there a single place with the most up-to-date kernel sources with usb hardware drivers, audio support for modem, etc.?

There's no single place. Ideally this question should be answered by "use the mainline kernel", and eventually it will.

I'm aware of three maintained kernel trees specifically for PinePhone:

Samuel's: https://github.com/smaeul/linux Mine: https://github.com/megous/linux/ Pine64: https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/linux/commits/pine64-kernel-5....

I think at the moment all of those are pretty much equivalent feature-wise, except for some mild differences.

It's not possible to workaround (in software) anything that requires CC pins to work properly, that includes setting up display port alternate mode.

Awesome work! Thanks so much, should've definitely been mentioned in the post.

Thank you for your work! I am so glad that you are doing what you are doing, because I personally want something the Pinephone project to succeed and its success makes me think that there are forces for good in the world.

Thank you so much! A lot of us have been tracking the steady progress on the PinePhone with great excitement, so much love from all of us, and thanks to you and everyone else for all the hard work.

You are doing our work and I am grateful

Thanks for all of your work! Your blog was one of the first I found after mine arrived and it's been a great resource.

Great work! Some day I might have a smart phone. Still using a $12 flip phone. For power conservation, could there be a hybrid mode, that comes out of sleep once per (user defined) interval to check messages, then go back to standby?

Even better, the phone can just sleep and modem will wake it up when (SMS) messages/or calls are received. No need for polling.

You can also set up RTC to wake up the phone periodically and perform whatever polling you need and put it back to sleep afterwards, all automatically.

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