MNT Pocket Reform and brownout with weird flickering after

MNT Pocket Reform
1

I’ve had a weird thing happen a few times with the Pocket Reform and the RK3588.

  • Use GNOME (doesn’t happen on Sway, which makes me think it’s GPU related)
  • Do some other things, like maybe compile something
  • Walk away
  • Come back, the machine powered off
  • Power back on without explicitly powering off
  • Boots back up with the screen flickering nauseatingly
  • Power fully off, wait a few minutes
  • It’s fine again

I suspect, without good evidence, that this is something to do with the GPU overheating. Anyone else seen something like this?

It does look like reform-power-daemon is running, fwiw.

2

Hi, in IRC you said that you are running Debian stable which I guess is from reform.d.n and that you are on charger board V2. This is important to mention with issue reports.

To rule out that this is a software issue, could you flash the latest MNT system image to an sd-card and then try to reproduce the same situation which made your Pocket behave the way it did?

1 Like
3

Yes, I’ll give that a shot, thanks!

4

Well I haven’t yet tried what @josch suggested, I have just been using Sway, which does work fine. But I managed to trigger the screen flickering via a different mechanism which I think is worth recording!

Somehow I put my pocket not-fully-turned-off in its case and my backpack and pulled it out in searing hot form, draining to 1% battery. When I realized what I did I corrected for it and let it cool down a bit before powering back on. But it was still hot when I turned it on, and the screen was flickering rapidly again!

I let it cool further with the battery disconnected and it booted it when a bit cooler, and it flickered less. Then I booted it after letting it cool off the rest of the way and it was fine!

So I think my suspicion of the flickering being related to the overheating GPU is probably right. Which doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try @josch’s recommendation of using the official Debian Unstable image and reporting back! But maybe this is useful info for something sometime, I don’t know :slight_smile:

5

Hm, I noticed that if I turn up the brightness, flickering is still a bit visible, but not too bad. I will try reseating the video cable later.