[release notes] Pallas-Yllästunturi 3.4.0

the “android” applications do not systematically close when you close them and they often remain in the background.

That’s a (normal) Android thing. “open” and “closing” apps in Android is about opening and closing their windows (The “views” in MVC parlance) not the actual application.

I wrote a HOWTO on the previous Question-forum. Basically, you have to hunt down all the way which could automatically start an app in the background (autostart, cloud messaging, notifications).

It’s not 100% complete, there are still way to start an application.

Notably, the “share” function in Android: applications have to option to directly list destination. E.g.: chat applications list your most frequent contact so you can directly send them a picture from the share screen - instead of needing to , e.g.: select the contact in WhatsApp. AliExpress’ app is an example that gets started this way (whenever you share a picture, AliExpress also starts to suggest chat threads to share it into) and it manages to stay active even after.
A circumvention to avoid that is to install AlienDalvik Control and share photos from within Sailfish: ADC will add an extra “Share to Android” entry in Sailfish’s “Shareto” function, and that one only list accepting application, it does not start the applications themselves to obtain a list of most frequent contacts.

You still have to stop apps manually who refuse to exit when you close their windows (but again, that’s standard Android function, it’s the same on android tablets).

the kernel stack bug is not solved and its size increases over the days except by rebooting the smartphone

Also @elvarr:

Compass does not work on Sony Xperia 10 Plus.

This whole class of problem would completely go away if Jolla accept to sell Sailfish X (complete with AlienDalvik, etc.) on devices that support upstream vanilla kernel.
Most of it arise due to old kernel on whatever blob the manufacturer provided at the time Jolla ported the adaptation layer. Even if some companies - like Sony for Xperia X - do provide some firmware updates (unlike Qualcom for Jolla 1), it seems that the Jolla devs lack the time/ressources to port a new adaptation on top of it.

e.g.: The PinePhone from Pine64 is supported by a standard kernel. Any new update to kernel and driver done by the larger linux community can be used directly, without needing to have someone battle against some android firmware blob with libhybris.

Now specifically:

its size increases over the days

Not a solution, but a workaround: buy some “High Endurance” µSDHC or µSDXC(*) card, and make a 4GiB swap partition there.
Leaked unusude memory will get swaped out and won’t eat your RAM.

(*): Just make sure to reformat the main partition from exFAT to something supported in Sailfish. I personally go for BTRFS, but EXT4 would be a perfectly valid solution. Use FAT32 if you want to share easily with a Windows latpot.

8 Likes

Thank you very much for all your explanations. At the moment I always preferred not to install applications by openrepos. I will apply your recommendations and leave myself a few days to see if it improves the closure of androids apps. On the other hand, I do not control the command line enough to pass the swap on the µSD card. Maybe at Christmas, if my son can come and see us and if he agrees to do it. He is a computer developer who masters this particularly well. And sorry for my poor english so i used an automatic translator.

But that’s exactly the way how Android became what it is today. Totally overpacked with so many functions and possibilities accompanied with the desire to satisfy every customers needs resulting in confusing menues.
From my point of view the function should stand above the look. Comparing the old and new behavior how to pick up the phone, I really can’t see any advantage between them. It’s just a different way how pick it up.

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@mal This could explain why my Xperia 10’s proximity sensor tends to fail after a couple of days while I have no such problem with the XA2. Can you confirm this?

(The problem is there for a while and has nothing to do with 3.40.24 which did not provide any problems for me)

There is an issue in the Xperia 10 kernel and/or modem/adsp firmware which causes those subsystems to reset sometimes and it doesn’t always recover correctly, sometimes that causes also loss of audio.

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@mal - do you have any more information on this topic?
I have opened a bug-report Whole audio dead and sensors (proximity / light) stop working - but not answer/idea yet where it does come from

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I have the same problem after trying to upgrade to 3.4. Unfortunately no ssh. Do you have any other ideas how to solve this?

Another thing that comes to mind be through recovery mode, but I have not tried that and can’t give any first hand experience. I’m not up-to-date on the linked thread, but maybe there’s something regarding that in there.

If you can’t SSH into the smartphone:

  • If you did install the developper extensions and are just rejected from making SSH connection: try plugging the smartphone to the laptop as soon as the boot logo appears. There is a short window of time when the USB-network is already available, but the GUI doesn’t require you yet to type a PIN or swipe your fingerprints. (As soon as the GUI has started or - in your case - as soon as the GUI has crashed to a black screen, you cannot SSH without entering PIN/fingerprints before. Except that, if the GUI has crashed, you can’t enter the PIN/fingerprints neither so you’re locked out of SSH). You need to SSH into the smartphone as soon as your laptop sees the USB-network appearing.

  • If you haven’t even installed the developper extensions and actually don’t have a running SSH on your smartphone: check what is the proper combo to put your smartphone into recovery mode.

    • on Jolla 1: there is a volume key+power button combo that boots into recovery mode.
    • On Xperia X, XA2, etc.: there is a volume key+cable combo that boots into fastboot mode. Once your smartphone is in fastboot, there is a command to load-up the recovery over USB.

    Once in recovery mode, you should be able to use telnet to connect to your smartphone. Once in telnet, the smartphone will welcome you with a menu that gives you the option to mount the smartphone’s actuall filesystem and give you a shell.
    Once in the shell, you should be able to “chroot” into the mount-point where the filesystem is mount and either try to fix or try backup any important data to the SD card.

  • In my case (could SSH using the first method above), the problem was due to a broken package (an older version of Aliendalvik Control which couldn’t be removed) that crashed the installation and left the system in half-updated broken state (e.g.: dependencies for running SSU were missing so even running the update didn’t work anymore. DBus is another critical part which might end up broken).

    The solution was to use the RPMs in the cache in /home/.pk-zypp-dist-upgrade-cache/ and try re-installing dbus and ssu. If rpm complains about missing dependencies, you should be able to find them there too. Keep adding the packages that RPM dependencies solver requires to the command line, until the installation is sucessful (in my case, I instead put a symlinks into /var/cache/zypp and used zypper to solve the dependencies).

    Once SSU is functionnal again, you should be able to finish the update via the command line.

    In my case, to fix the broken Aliendalvik Control package that couldn’t uninstall, I used rpm -e --noscripts to force removing it despite the broken uninstall script.

  • If you can’t fix:

    • On Xperia, you could boot the phone into fastboot and reflash the latest version of the Sailfish OS.
    • On Jolla 1, the telnet menu gives you the possibility to revert to the factor snapshop. (This snapshot might be very old and you might need to install multiple upgrade until your smartphone is up to date).
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This now happens several times a day with my Xperia 10 - I have no such problem with the XA2:

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If the new incoming call interface stays (and I think it will, even if I see various complaints here on the forum), then the interface to dismiss an alarm (from the Clock app) should adopt the same style, for consistency.

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I there. I tried on mine, update showed, downloaded, installed but in the end it said update was not possible and i should restart. After that i went to info and it shows version 3.4.0.24. If i go to updates on setting is says “page not available”. Any ideas? Thanks

Regardless of updating Android app support, Xperia X would benefit a lot from updated kernel.

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I remember reading the log of some IRC meeting where @veskuh (I think?) was describing the issues a more recent kernel (maybe it was 4.4?) for Suzu (the Xperia X hw platform) was giving the hardware adaptation. It was something about a timing issue that was caused by a disabled daemon. The blob released from Sony’s Open Device program contained this change. While on pure Android this doesn’t seem to cause problems, for SFOS it means random boot failures.
Take this with a grain of salt since I can’t remember where that log was referenced on TJC and I might have misunderstood the issue.

tl;dr: Unless Sony devs themselves help shed light to the particular kernel config issues, there’s nobody at Jolla who has the time to fix the AOSP kernel so SFOS runs properly on it. Kernel 3.10 it remains.

I would be curious though if any of the rom communities that ported thei Android spin to Suzu might be able to contribute (OmniROM used to have a very good version of Oreo based on Kernel 4.4). Maybe if the details of the problems holding back the HAL development were known, it could be worth a shot?

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The screen of my Xperia 10 still goes blank for a while on 3.4.0.24 when decrypting the user data after I enter my pin. I think that the bug that:

  • During the decryption of user data in device start-up, there is a period of 10-20 seconds such that the display is black
    Still haven’t been fixed.
    I flashed this Xperia 10 from Android using my laptop. Instead of upgrading from previous version of sailfish.

Finnish humor?

Last login: Mon Nov 9 14:36:26 2020 from 192.168.49.2
,—
| Sailfish OS 3.4.0.24 (Pallas-Yllästunturi)
'—
[nemo@Xperia10-DualSIM ~]$ uname -a
Linux Xperia10-DualSIM 4.9.221 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Jul 14 20:53:56 UTC 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

[nemo@Xperia10-DualSIM ~]$ uname -a
Linux Xperia10-DualSIM 4.9.221 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Jul 14 20:53:56 UTC 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

[root@Xperia10-DualSIM nemo]# version
Sailfish OS 3.4.0.24 (Pallas-Yllästunturi)

[nemo@Xperia10-DualSIM ~]$ dmesg

[ 0.000000] **********************************************************
[ 0.000000] ** NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE **
[ 0.000000] ** **
[ 0.000000] ** trace_printk() being used. Allocating extra memory. **
[ 0.000000] ** **
[ 0.000000] ** This means that this is a DEBUG kernel and it is **
[ 0.000000] ** unsafe for production use. **
[ 0.000000] ** **
[ 0.000000] ** If you see this message and you are not debugging **
[ 0.000000] ** the kernel, report this immediately to your vendor! **
[ 0.000000] ** **
[ 0.000000] ** NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE **
[ 0.000000] **********************************************************

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It seems that 3.4.0.24 broke enabling signature spoofing:
[3.4.0.24] Signature spoofing doesn't work on a freshly flashed xperia 10 plus

The “fix” is to downgrade to 3.3, enable signature spoofing there, then upgrade to 3.4 but Jolla doesn’t provide downloads for old versions of Sailfish. With the amount of apps that rely on signature spoofing one way or another (through all of the google services,) this is a massive break for Android compatibility.

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Because I missed calls, because of problems with Storeman (no installation possible, updating some apps did not work, while others like Fernschreiber only work with Pallas-Y), because GPS was worse than ever, I brought my XA2 back to Torronsuo. Now the device doesn’t accept the SDcard anymore. Everything gone, pictures, contacts, notes, documents. Formatting did not succeed. And not one radio app from Jolla Store works. It seems as if there is no connection to the browser. It’s a mess, to my regret.
A few years ago Sailfish worked fine and I could do a lot with it. Concerning GPS I can understand that the lack of a Mozilla license changed things. But the other issues are incomprehensible and hard to accept.

3 Likes

Hm, I did several resets of my XA2 and always enabled Signature Spoofing after running all updates. So Spoofing with 3.4 had been no problem…

Would you mind posting exactly what you did over in the other thread? Quite a lot of us are having problems so I’m wondering if you’re doing anything differently.