Kernel config and custom Kernels

MattA

Hi all, I've been using Solus for over 3 years now and apart from a few minor bumps along the road I've been super happy with it and have managed to do everything I've wanted/needed including a few tweaks and customisations here and there, but now I've come up against a bit of a hurdle.

I have an older bluetooth Apple Magic mouse which I am very fond of and it works perfectly under Mac OS, Windows and mostly every Linux distro I've used too with one minor caveat.
It suffers from random disconnects on Linux distros and over the course of a few weeks of debug I've pinned it down to battery information polling by upowerd causing intermittent timeouts and the connection is then lost, it reconects OK but only after about 20-30 seconds which is very inconvenient.
Other bluetooth devices do not suffer this problem, and this device works on other OS so I'm aware it's a problem with this device on linux but I really do not want to use another device as this should be fixable.

With upowerd disabled all the problems go away, but this is not really a viable long-term option as not only does it remove other functionality it causes other apps to crash.
I've tried numerous tweaks with disabling battery plugin in bluetoothd (no effect) and trying to find a way to run/configure upowerd with the battery polling disabled but I've had no success there.
On other machines where I have rebuilt the kernel, compiling with HID_BATTERY_STRENGTH=N solves the problem, and I'm OK with that loss of function to check battery levels, it allows upowerd to be used again for other features, so I was also going to implement this fix on Solus but recompiling and using a custom Kernel seems to be much trickier on Solus an I've reached the point where I'm stuck.

Is there a (relatively) easy way to recompile (I'm OK doing this bit) and use a custom Kernel with Solus that I've not found? Are there any docs for how to do this?

Many thanks!
Matt

davidjharder

MattA Hi Matt, Welcome to the forum!

Could you be persuaded to file a bug report for this? https://dev.getsol.us/maniphest/task/edit/form/7/
Maybe this could become part of the default config, depending on what effects this config has.

Alternatively, you can compile your own custom kernel, but it's not recommended. You would have to also compile various drivers that are updated in lockstep with the kernel. Feel free to ask questions here, or over on the matrix channels: https://matrix.to/#/#solus:matrix.org We have a dev channel that would be the perfect place for these questions

MattA

Thanks for your reply davidjharder.

I have not filed a bug report because as far as I'm aware this is an issue with this specific device (possibly others too) and the way upowerd polls for the battery status. It's even more annoying since it's intermittent, not every battery status poll causes the drop, but it happens on a regular enough basis to be disruptive.

I don't think changing the config parameter as part of the default config would be wise as the battery status is a valuable feature and works fine for thousands of other devices. It would be much more useful to be able to disable at runtime by a passing a parameter but that's not the case for this feature.

Alternatively it would be great to be able to either disable this feature in upowerd or to add some kind of per-device exclusion/mask there but again, no way to do so as far as I can tell other than manually patching upower.

I'm running with upowerd disabled/masked at the moment, since this is a desktop machine the impact is minimal but I do have to remember that it has some consequences, like causing Budgie Control Center to crash if you load the Power page, it's easy to work around by re-enabling when needed but I just was hoping for a better fix.

Thanks!
Matt