[Clock app] Scheduled alarms fail

Bug Reports
51

AFAICS there are several potential causes for an alarm not going off, or at least not alarming someone. (The following list is more or less from memory of several forum posts, not thoroughly researched.)

  1. RTC support: Depending on device/port, RTC wake-up may be supported or not. No support means no waking up of the device for an alarm (from “deep sleep” or power-off). This is what makes N9(00) users wonder what’s happening, as RTC wakeups work fine on those old devices. Affected XPeria devices probably listed here.
  2. ngfd hanging: certain sounds may cause ngfd to “hang”, i.e. be in limbo, running but not doing its job. If it crashed, that would cause systemd to restart it, but that is not happening. So alarm does go off, Clock plays it as it is supposed to, but there is no sound.
    Restarting ngfd solves this.
  3. pulseaudio hanging. Lots of people report solving sound issues by restarting the pulseaudio service. PA may or may not actually be the reason here, possibly restarting the service fixes some other issue (like 2. above), causing the impression PA is to blame.
  4. Clock app forgetting scheduled alarms. There’s two issues here:
    a. Sometimes the clock app does not load its configuration after boot, causing all scheduled alarms to not work
    b. clock app does not load its configuration, and triggers alarms, but fails to deliver any alarms to the (audio?) subsystem.
    My observation is that both 4a and 4b happen with increased probability if device is booted from “act-dead” mode (charging mode), but it can happen with a regular boot as well.
    It seems to be some kind of startup race condition.
    Restarting both timed-qt5 and Lipstick resolves this.
  5. Silent gesture. When the option to silence alarms and calls by turning the device display-down is enabled, alarms can be completely silent if the device is display-down at the moment an alarm goes off.

So, depending of which of the above applies, Calendar alarms may be affected, or not.

This Bug report should only be about Number 4, but as it’s tricky see through it all, people comment on the others in here as well.

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