Librem 5 December 2019 Software Update

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Although we’re well into 2020, the changelog-style software progress reports for the turn of the year have yet to be published. Let’s fix that by giving a brief update of what happened in December.

Some of the activities below were already mentioned in their own articles in Purism’s news archive; others will be covered in more depth in future articles. This is just a taste of all the work that goes into making the Librem 5 software stack. You can follow development more closely at source.puri.sm.

Power management

Improvements to Librem 5 battery charging and management, along with work on suspend management continue to help with heat, power and battery life issues.

• Fix charging detection on the tps6598x side, the bq2589x/upower side needs another fix to also get it right when power is available during boot
• Fix battery drain caused by tps6598x IRQ going crazy – this boosts the time the phone runs at a lower temperature.
• Unbreak real time clock, so that the time is kept when the phone is powered off.
• Suspend discussions: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-usb/38edc05e-680b-d881-49fc-e8230a93b2c8@puri.sm/
• librem5-base: Enable instant autosuspend for USB devices to save power.
• Fix battery drain caused by tps6598x IRQ, boosting the amount of time the phone runs before getting warm.

Keyboard

The virtual (on-screen) keyboard continues to grow and evolve, with performance improvements and new visual features.

• Terminal layout
• Emoji layout (in version 1.6.0)
• Documentation for testing new layouts
• Simplified the renderer
• Added DCO

Sensors

Initial work on light and motion sensors build the foundations for future work to integrate them into the shell.

• Fixed light sensor scaling to get correct values.
• Added proximity sensor support to iio-sensor-proxy so that it supports the sensor used in the Librem 5 and other devices.
• Motion sensor DTS updates were upstreamed see here and here.
• Support ambient light sensors using raw values – for vcnl4000 class and similar devices.
• lm3692: Use exponential brightness mode, making brightness sliders use the full range.

Shell and Compositor

Work to improve application handling continues alongside improvements to visual aspects that help to show the state of wireless and cellular network connections.

• Update wlroots submodule to include the virtual keyboard keycode 0 fix.
• Hide shell overlay when activating a fullscreen window
• Add doap file and expand uploaders
• Only show the WWAN icon if a modem is found, hiding the modem when ModemManager does not present one, more in line with the state of the kill switch and to make it look better on laptops without modems.
• Properly raise GTK application windows on activation
• Fix the wifi icon displaying incorrect state

System

Some parts of the system need work to ensure that everything works together as intended. These don’t always get the attention they deserve but help to make the system robust, and need to function correctly so that higher level components work properly.

• Fully turn off the backlight to save power when the brightness value is zero, and remove the hard-coded maximum.
• Turned custom backlight hacks into upstreamable kernel code.
• Add patched pulseaudio for loopback latency tweaks
• Add user purism to netdev group – to enable rfkill access so that things like GNOME Bluetooth work.
• Prepare to enable plymouth splash and disable blinking cursor by default, for when plymouth is included in the system image.
• Enable apparmor by default.
• Restrict dmesg access to be in-line with modern distros
• Enable acls on tmpfs (so logind can do it’s job and the purism user only gets privileges when logged in)

Design

Care is taken with the design so that the applications and system as a whole behave intuitively and consistently.

• Revisited the designs for the recent calls list and call details dialog in Calls.
• Worked on a pragmatic initial terminal keyboard layout.
• Started discussing an adaptive sound testing dialog upstream.

Apps

The applications and system components themselves continue to see improvements and new additions. This includes necessary work on upstream and backend software.

• Chats: window: Let F10 key open menu
• Chats: Add settings-dialog
• libpurple: Warn and return early if messaging is NULL
• Documents Reader (Evince) was ported to the Librem 5 and tagged for shipping.
• Contacts: Improved leaflet animation and added a back gesture – merged downstream and upstream.
• Settings: Implement new design for the Formats dialog
• Initial setup: Always change system language regardless of whether the user is new or existing.

Releases

During December new releases of core components were made.

• libhandy 0.0.12
• phosh 0.1.6
• phoc 0.1.4

Infrastructure

As the stack grows more mature, some builds are no longer needed, especially since we target the aarch64 architecture with the Librem 5.

• Drop more failing armhf builds