rtcsyncwake-pinephone

A simple way to enable the Pinephone to wake itself from sleep (ideally) without root privs.

If you're on a KDE Plasma Mobile PostmarketOS Pinephone, you can also use my shell script and OpenRC init script to have all KClock alarms and timers wake your Pinephone from suspend and ring the alarms.

Requirements

To run rtcwaker without root your kernel must 1) support xattrs on your filesystem and 2) support Linux capabilities.

If your kernel doesn't meet either of those requirements, you can always run rtcwaker as a setuid binary (see option 2 below in Configuring rtcwaker) or with sudo.

Installation

Building rtcwaker

$ gcc -o rtcwaker rtcwaker.c

Configuring rtcwaker

There are two ways to setup rtcwaker such that it will run as a regular (non-root) user.

1. Using capabilities (Preferred)

$ sudo setcap cap_wake_alarm+ep /full/path/to/rtcwaker

If you get Operation not supported or similar, either a) your kernel lacks support for capabilities, b) your filesystem lacks support for xattrs or is mounted without xattr support, or c) your kernel is not configured with xattr support for your filesystem.

If you're not sure what the 3 possiblilites mean or how to resolve them, you can always try option 2

2. Using setuid (Should be fine for rtcwaker)

$ sudo chown root:root rtcwaker
$ sudo chmod u+s rtcwaker

Usage

To have the Pinephone wake from suspend at time 1619387000:

$ ./rtcwaker 1619387000

To run it in the background after you close your shell, you can run:

$ ./rtcwaker 1619387000 & disown

Using the Shell Scripts

The rtcsync.sh shell script fetches the next timer or alarm from Plasma Mobile's KClock and tells rtcwaker to wake the phone at that time so the alarm can ring.

If you're on PostmarketOS, feel free to also use the rtcsyncwake init script to start this process automatically.

Requirements

• qdbus
• Plasma Mobile KClock

rtcsync.sh

First, set RTCWAKER to your rtcwaker binary. If you placed rtcwaker in your $PATH, you can also set it to just rtcwaker.

#!/bin/sh

# RTCWAKER=/home/user/rtcwaker
RTCWAKER=/path/to/your/rtcwaker

Next, make it executable and run it

$ chmod +x rtcsync.sh
$ ./rtcsync.sh
Found DBUS session bus address: ...

rtcsyncwake (OpenRC)

First, set command to your rtcsync.sh shell script, and switch command_user to your user.

Note: this should probably be the same user who's running KDE

#!/sbin/openrc-run

...

# command="/home/user/rtcsync.sh"
command="/path/to/your/rtcsync.sh"
command_background=true
# command_user="user:user"
command_user="your-user:your-user"
pidfile= ...

...

Next move it to /etc/init.d/, make it executable, and add it to OpenRC's default runlevel

$ sudo cp rtcsyncwake /etc/init.d/
$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/rtcsyncwake
$ sudo rc-update add rtcsyncwake default

FAQs

Why did you do this? And why didn't you implement it in [this other way]?

You'll probably find those answers on my blog.

I have two wakeups I want to schedule. How do I set two wakeups?

./rtcwaker [TIMESTAMP_1] & ./rtcwaker [TIMESTAMP_2] &

How can I tell if rtcwaker is actually running?

ps -a | grep rtcwaker

I ran ./rtcwaker TIMESTAMP and my Pinephone woke up, but there was no alarm! Why?

rtcwaker only schedules a wakeup from the hardware clock - it doesn't contain any code to play an alarm sound.

If you're on Plasma Mobile, rtcsync.sh can be used to synchronise the hardware wakeup with KClock's scheduled alarms and timers. I.e., rtcwaker wakes the phone, and KClock rings the alarm.

Why didn't you code in an alarm-sound-ringer into rtcwaker?

I wanted rtcwaker to be useful for more than just alarms. For example, if you wanted to implement a "wake up and fetch notifications regularly" feature, you could write a script to spawn an rtcwaker process every 5 minutes.

Also, KClock already does an awesome job at ringing alarms.

When I run rtcsync.sh I get a message like 0: unknown operand. What's going on?

You're probably missing qdbus, or you're running Plasma Mobile without dbus (? is this even possible?). Try installing qdbus, and making sure dbus is running.

I'm not running PostmarketOS / I'm running Manjaro KDE Plasma Mobile, but I really want to use your scripts! How can I do so?

Follow the installation instructions above for rtcwaker and rtcsync.sh. Then create a systemd service to start rtcsync.sh as your user (with User= and optionally Group=).

Ideally, schedule it to start after KDE has started (probably multi-user.target).

By the way, systemd system timers can already wake the Pinephone from suspend, so you could also consider just using systemd alone instead. Check out the fantastic wake-mobile if you're curious.

I'm running Phosh and I really want Gnome Clocks to automatically wake my Pinephone!

I tried Phosh a few times but never really got into it. rtcwaker will still wake your phone at whatever time you ask it to, but you'll have to synchronise Gnome Clock alarms with rtcwaker one way or another.

Also note that this issue is still open in the Mobian Gitlab repo. Phosh has an odd habit of not going back into suspend if woken up by the rtc... YMMV. Also, check out wake-mobile.