Openmoko Bug #2229: GSM was working fine for months, suddenly will not register using any GSM stack

[Openmoko Public Trac]

#2229: GSM was working fine for months, suddenly will not register using any GSM
stack
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 Reporter:  danek2    |          Owner:  hardware                  
     Type:  defect    |         Status:  new                       
 Priority:  normal    |      Milestone:                            
Component:  hardware  |        Version:  GTA02v5                   
 Severity:  normal    |       Keywords:  calypso, gsm, registration
 Haspatch:  0         |      Blockedby:                            
Estimated:            |    Patchreview:                            
 Blocking:            |   Reproducible:  always                    
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 Disclaimer: I suspect this affects my handset only, as I haven't seen
 similar reports on the forums or here. One person (BillK on the forums)
 has a problem he believes is similar, although his phone does still work
 on some distributions, whereas mine does not. I also don't know if his
 phone ever worked when using gsm0710muxd. See bug 2215.

 I started using Neo Freerunner as a daily phone (with much difficulty at
 first) in August '08. I was very happy with it until one day in December
 it suddenly stopped registering GSM. The phone was on, I had been making
 some calls in 2008.12, and a few hours later, phone still on from before,
 I tried dialing out and discovered that I wasn't registered. I used a
 landline to make the call I needed to make, and discovered that people had
 been trying to contact me for some time and were going straight to
 voicemail. I rebooted my phone, as had become common practice by that
 point, but still did not register. At the time, I assumed that perhaps I
 was getting poor reception (I was working in an unfamiliar building), but
 a colleague of mine who was at the same location with me at the time and
 has the same GSM provider was able to use his phone normally. Later, when
 I was outdoors I tried rebooting again, to no avail. I got to my office,
 where I had an old GSM phone, and was able to put my SIM there so I could
 use a phone for the rest of the day.

 When I got home that night, I tried swapping SIMs. I tried three different
 SIMs from two different carriers, all of which had previously worked with
 the Freerunner. Then I tried reflashing images. After a couple of
 reflashes failed to restore functionality, I put the Freerunner down.

 I have not once been able to successfully register GSM since the day that
 it mysteriously stopped working. Every once in a while when I get the time
 to mess around with the phone, I try some more troubleshooting, but have
 not had much time to devote to this. Nevertheless, I have tried many
 different images, including 2007.2 (or 2008.4), 2008.8, 2008.9, 2008.12,
 Qtopia 4.3 and 4.4, and FSO Milestones 3, 4, and 5. GSM was known to be
 working with all of these images prior to the time that it stopped
 working, with the exception of FSO Milestone 5, for the obvious reason
 that it was not available before the phone stopped working. Not a single
 one of them has worked since the phone stopped registering.

 I have also tried using GSM manually, according to
 http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Manually_using_GSM - this also fails. I
 attempted this on 2007.2/2008.4, since the other distributions don't talk
 to GSM the same way. It hangs on "Connected." and never indicates
 readiness for AT commands.

 I know that the SIM card is visible to the system, because it can see my
 saved contacts and SMS messages, and because when I set a SIM pin it
 prompts me for the PIN, accepts the correct one, and rejects an incorrect
 one.

 The firmware has also been updated, though this has not changed anything.
 It was running moko8 at the time that it suddenly stopped working. After
 updating to moko10 no change was observed.

 I also tried, at BillK's suggestion, writing different UART settings to
 /dev/ttySAC0, but this never achieved anything, either. See
 http://lists.openmoko.org/nabble.html#nabble-tt1649863

 I don't know what to do anymore at this point, and suspect that my Calypso
 has mysteriously died. The only thing I haven't erased and restored on the
 phone yet is the NAND u-boot environment: this got corrupted some time
 ago, and when I write a new u-boot environment to partition 2 (the
 partition names are not visible to DFU-Util in my NAND u-boot until I
 write a u-boot environment) it gets borked again when I next reboot. The
 only way to boot the phone is to boot into NOR u-boot; otherwise I get a
 garbled screen. However, I don't think this has anything to do with the
 GSM registration problem, as the phone had been unbootable from NAND
 u-boot for about six weeks before GSM stopped registering.

 I am attaching three dumps from logread:

 logdump.txt was taken from 2008.12 about a week after GSM stopped working.
 logdumpwpin.txt was taken from the same setup, after setting a SIM PIN
 using another phone.
 logdumpfso5.txt was taken today using FSO Milestone 5.

 To recap:

 - GSM registration worked fine for about four months.
 - It suddenly and mysteriously stopped one day and hasn't worked since.
 - Three different SIMs which were known to work no longer work.
 - It used to work with gsmd, qpe, and gsm0710muxd. It now works with none
 of these.
 - It was running moko8 at the time that it stopped working. Upgrading to
 moko10 did not change the situation.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/2229>
docs.openmoko.org <http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/>
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