Qi starts and then dies - sometimes

[BillK]

Qi starts, you can feel the vibrator thump, and if lucky enough to be in an environment you may see the backlight is on, but some 10 seconds later the backlight switches off and nothing happens.

The lack of feedback that Qi is doing anything (the backlight isnt easily seen in many environments) means its a very frustrating way to bootup - and very time wasting as you have to wait many minutes to see if its booted or not, then often have to try again.

[PaulFertser]

I don't agree here, Bill.

You know how many vibes you feel when everything is working like you want to, so you'll notice any abnormal situation by counting vibes. After the kernel is booted (you say that you can see backlight in certain conditions, but you know that the kernel is booted anyway, by feeling proper number of vibes), it's up to the kernel, then to the userspace to show anything on screen.

It's doesn't depend on bootloader. If you want messages, enable them in your append-GTA02 file and have the feedback on the price of slower boot.

[andy]

There's a simple rule of thumb, if the backlight came up then blame the kernel, not Qi. Qi doesn't bring up the backlight, so your kernel is quite far along with booting.

What you're describing though is what happens if you try to start GTA02 without a battery or with very low battery.

As Paul says enable kernel debug messages on LCM and find out your kernel or hardware -- not Qi -- problem that way.

For the larger issue of feedback, we can enable kernel splash image to help it.

[andy]

Actually, I think this was just broken around the time of this report, and fixed by this patch

​http://git.openmoko.org/?p=qi.git;a=commitdiff;h=8d1f923d31d63ccfad6c5406a117edaa2ee851c4

so I am marking as fixed.