Kobo Minesweeper

[sheep_wizard]

Hi all, I decided to make minesweeper for kobo devices.

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ06zaX2aZM

Source:
https://github.com/SheepWizard/kobo-minesweeper

There is a issue where the screen will sometimes randomly freeze and you need to reboot. If anyone who has used FBInk experienced a similar problem please let me know how to fix.

[NiLuJe]

Originally Posted by sheep_wizard

There is a issue where the screen will sometimes randomly freeze and you need to reboot.

On a Clara HD or something else?

The Clara HD issues are mostly limited to rota 0 @ 8bpp, which is neither the default rotation nor the default bitdepth.

For the Libra 2/Clara 2E/Nia, you might want to try throwing a
fbink_wakeup_epdc (which is only available on master right now) before every refresh attempt (or on every user input, which is what Nickel does with a ~5s debounce).

I'm still debating whether folding that hack inside "implicit" refresh calls via an FBInkConfig field, but testing this is tedious, so I haven't bothered so far.

[sheep_wizard]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

On a Clara HD or something else?

The Clara HD issues are mostly limited to rota 0 @ 8bpp, which is neither the default rotation nor the default bitdepth.

For the Libra 2/Clara 2E/Nia, you might want to try throwing a
fbink_wakeup_epdc (which is only available on master right now) before every refresh attempt (or on every user input, which is what Nickel does with a ~5s debounce).

I'm still debating whether folding that hack inside "implicit" refresh calls via an FBInkConfig field, but testing this is tedious, so I haven't bothered so far.

Only tested on clara HD so far. Dont really understand what you mean with the Clara HD issues, is there something I can do too prevent the issue?

[NiLuJe]

I meant just that: all of the Mk. 7 devices are prone to (apparently) random EPDC hangs, but as far as the Clara HD is concerned, I'm mostly aware of them on very non-default fb setups.

The epdc PM poke I mentioned was designed to workaround other, much more severe EPDC hangs on more recent devices, but I have no idea if it helps with the Mk. 7 issues, as I no longer daily drive one, and the one I did (a Forma), only crashed exceedingly rarely, so testing this is a nightmare.

[sheep_wizard]

You may need to dumb it down a bit for me, i'm new to all this

1. What is EPDC and what caused it too hang?

2. Is there any configuration of FBInk I can set to make this less likely to happen, like picking a certain waveform.

3. Is there anything else I can do to prevent this EPDC hang?

[NiLuJe]

1. The display driver/controller. No idea, the stock NTX kernels aren't verbose enough. Feels low-level power-management related, as being plugged in or having wi-fi enabled usually prevents almost all of the hangs.

2. Not as of yet, as this is extremely use-case specific, and I feel like taking the Nickel approach of doing this in an input handler sounds slightly more sensible than asking fbink to force it before every refresh. (Which is what we did in KOReader, but, again, that's a specific use-case where we know we never really send ioctl storms, so it's mostly fine for us).

3.

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

you might want to try throwing a
fbink_wakeup_epdc (which is only available on master right now) before every refresh attempt (or on every user input, which is what Nickel does with a ~5s debounce).

Since you're using the Python module, you don't actually have access to that function until I rebuild and update all the things (... soon(TM)).

EDIT: Also, as mentioned above, this isn't exactly aimed at the Mk. 7 issues. In fact, the Clara HD kernel might not even *provide* the sysfs knob this is poking!

EDIT²: Depending on what exactly you're doing, you might also want to batch some draw and/or refresh calls together, too (c.f., the no_refresh config & fbink_refresh), to avoid sending ioctl storms.

TL;DR: So, yeah, check if you can repro while plugged in and monitoring over SSH via USBNet and/or over Wi-Fi, because if you can, that's not what I've been talking about, and might simply be PEBCAK .

[sheep_wizard]

Thanks for dumbing it down for me

I batched together the draws into 1 refresh and that seems to have fixed the issue. For context I was drawing at worst about 90 images all at once, so I guess that was to much for my device to handle