Black screen of death w/ waydroid
-
I tried to follow this way this morning: started the phone, launched Waydroid, waiting on the Waydroid home screen for 15' for the FP5 to go black, then wait 15' more and pressing the power button: the phone was back to the lock screen and after that Waydroid was operational. I have 24.04.1 stable installed over Android 13 like you.
-
I may have to eat my words here. After doing the test as described in my previous post, I just stopped Waydroid, stuck the phone in my pocket and got out.
Several hours later, I wanted to use my phone and had an experience that looks like what you said, but a bit different: I could vaguely see the lock screen but as seen behind a very dark screen, and I did not succeed in unlock the screen. After fiddling for about a minute trying to bring the phone to life, it did go darker still, I could not even see anything. I restarted the phone and it worked as normal, so it was not a case of battery gone to nothing.
I did not relate immediately this problem to your post because it was slightly different - I had Waydroid stopped. But now that I think of it, maybe it was. If it's true, starting Waydroid and letting the phone go to sleep could have unexpected, long delayed consequences. If I had not seen it before, maybe it's because I almost never use Waydroid.
-
G gpatel-fr referenced this topic
-
said in Black screen of death w/ waydroid:
I just stopped Waydroid,
Or so I believed at the time. However, when I start the phone and I run
ps fauxww | grep way
I get nothing. When I start waydroid and after running the so-called 'waydroid stop' app, when I run the same command line I see a line with the waydroid container still present. So the 'waydroid stop' app does not in fact stop waydroid, and while I was naively believing it was removed from memory it was still running.
And while repeating the test this morning I still got to the unlock screen and could use the phone, I noticed that the screen was darker than normal, as if the phone was remembering it was half asleep still
-
@gpatel-fr Sorry it took So long for me to get back to you, i thought i had a simple fix where i would just put waydroid as a background app and leave a native UT app in the foreground. this worked for a while until i tried to get microg working on waydroid. The problem i think we are having is waydroid not releasing the screen and keeping the screen off if we were to turn the screen off while waydroid is active and let it rest for a while this will happen. Another thing is this seems to come up whenever i use Signal, normal resting and its fine. im not sure whats going on but it seems there some incompatibility with waydroid and Ubuntu touch when idling or sleep mode.
this hurts compatibility for me because i would love to have my waydroid running while my screen is off as i can get notifications and such. What do you think or would recommend as an alternative to waydroid? especially for android apps? Not running Waydroid and just getting a seperate device for that? this is troubling
-
@gpatel-fr oh yeah that waydroid stop app thing doesn't work lol, i found that out awhile ago. running the commands like waydroid stop definitely doesnt work. so i resort to killing the Pid
-
@killclique said in Black screen of death w/ waydroid:
The problem i think we are having is waydroid not releasing the screen and keeping the screen off
It looks like that. I think now that it is a known problem and the 24.04.1 stable version still misses this fix.
-
@gpatel-fr yep, i just found out by ssh into the phone and running this command
sudo systemctl restart repowerd
turned my blackscreen back on. So this is the main culprit but also the bug you just referenced stated repowerd could be the problem or waydroid with both leading to crashes and black screens. i think me and you have been experiencing both on and off with each giving a seperate edge case to start but nonetheless the same result.
so whats next? how can we fix this problem? i would love for my waydroid application to be on all the time lol
-
i will also say that when i ran the command it took a good 2 minutes before the screen turned back on. it was hung up for a bit but once it finished the screen was on. so yeah thats interesting. my waydroid crashes sometimes but im going to fix that later, and if i cant... e/os it is
-
well, 24.04.1.1 is not there for ever, there will be at some point a 24.04.1.2 and it should get the fix.
For me, the problem is way too fleeting for me to take action, but you can try to fix it yourself by applying the change - I think that you'll need to turn the rootfs read/write for that.Maybe a workaround could be to disable the screen saver in Waydroid ? I have no idea if this could help (@fredldotme could you have a word on this ?)
-
Best you can do is update to the daily channel of your current baseline Ubuntu Touch version, and not update it for a while. It would have been to risky including the workaround that late in the release process. But yeah, the problem has been identified as being partially caused by opportunistic auto suspend of the phone.
