In short: Linux, embedded devices, programming, zen, bonsai, piano, juggling, music, hacks, electrotechnics, robotics, bike, AI, Linux again, computers.
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Nokia - old buddy

Few days ago I was quite scared that my old Nokia 5130 is leaving me. It's not so old as Nokia 3310, but it is old, at least from today's point of view. I have this one for almost 6 years. Pretty long, huh.

Well, about leving. My phone got stuck. And it scared me. Understand me right, Nokia got stuck. Not some phone with Android or Symbian or iOS or whatever. Nokia with S40 firwmare got stuck. It's at least strange. So, I made an investigation. What can ends with stuck or with extreme slowing down?

  • Bug at firmware core
  • Bug at memory (just worn out)
  • Overload

So, those are favorites for this. In fact, all of them are possible at this time. Overloading is quite common for me. I barrely reboot my phone, because memory is full of data and it takes a lot of time to start. But it is still less than Android mainstream. This is really odd.

I must admint I haven't try to reproduce it. But my personal tip is bug at firmware combined with overload. I really doubt that developers at Nokia tested SMS subsytem so heavy as I do. At memory of my phone is 3600 received and 2500 sent messages. This is 5MB. But if you think about that, ARM v9 at 220MHz with single core isn't ultra fast. And parse 5MB of SMS's, parse Contacts, prepare memory for use including SD card, it takes time. But it works. It take a lot of time at startup (about 4 minutes after boot to get to usable state). But what if I listen music and song switch to next. This means start loading form SD card via SPI. During that I receive SMS. That have higher priority, so processor stops loading song and start saving SMS. But it takes so long, because memory is fragmented and full and structure holding SMSs is just oveloaded. And some timeout kills that. But we must receice SMS nad load song. AArgh... What should I do? All of this! And it start switching between saving SMS and loading song. And problem is here.