Random shutdown

MNT Pocket Reform
1

I tried running the pocket reform nonstop for a while to test stability, and about once a week it somehow powers off when idle.

Looking through journalctl -b -1 I see a clean shutdown, with no apparent cause.

2

Do you have upower installed/running?

3

Yes, it is running. I did not do anything in particular about upower so I suppose it’s installed and enabled in the OS image.

4

OK, a theory: maybe rarely there could be a glitch that reports 0% battery to upower, which in turn shuts down. You could test that by disabling upower. On a sidenote, chromium is a package that pulls in upower for some reason.

5

this happened to me as well, upower saw the power glitch down to 0% and initiated a shutdown.

this behavior of shutdown on critical low power can be disabled in the upower config.

6

How can you tell it’s upower?

I see no shutdown reason in the logs. The system just shuts down.

7

If your battery has not calibrated (it needs to learn) it thinks it is at 0% and upower initiates a shutdown.

To calibrate you need to do a couple cycles from fully-charged → fully discharged. To allow it to fully discharge, stop upower. Each cycle the battery will report better its charge.

8

So having upower prevents battery calibration, interesting.

9

Does adding some glitch check to the driver sound like a good idea?

I suppose it’s an error in something somewhere if the driver returns 0 rather than an error or valid data on some reads but it’s difficult to diagnose when it happens once a week.

10

Oh well, you guys refer to some random situation. I thought this was the situation where battery does not know its limits, but it is not. Ignore the calibration advice then.

11

So another random shutdown. After power on it crashed and went into boot loop (showing garbage on screen, then ATF or what, then garbage again …)

Powered it off, and now even the power menu does not work.

Sounds like this piece of hardware has problems. Or possibly something went wrong with the charging logic and the battery discharged, I get quite a bit of draw from the power supply when connected, and after charging for a while I can power on again, the reported battery level is 6%

The most frustrating part is that something shuts down the system without giving any reason whatsoever.

1 Like
12

After updating the firmware to a development snapshot with PD support improvements I no longer see this problem.