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Modem on PinePhone

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Quectel EG25-G modem in PinePhone handles WWAN, GPS and celular services. It is based on Qualcomm MDM 9607 chipset, has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz.

The modem's fir­mware is split into two parts:

Most AT commands are run on a separeate DSP processor cores (Hexagon QDSP6 V5), with some being forwarded to a Linux userspace program called atfwd_daemon running on the ARM CPU.

Reverse engineering the exisintg software for ARM CPU inside the modem is quite easy using ghidra. ADB unlocker was made this way.

Modem power driver

My kernel is a bit special, since it contains a special modem power manager driver (released 2020–08–03 along with Linux 5.8).

My driver implements several features:

Enabling and disabling the power to the modem is as simple as:

# request powerup
echo 1 > /sys/class/modem-power/modem-power/device/powered
# request powerdown
echo 0 > /sys/class/modem-power/modem-power/device/powered
# read power status (changes only after power state transition is complete)
cat /sys/class/modem-power/modem-power/device/powered

So there's no need to mess with gpios via sysfs.

Connecting to the modem

You can connect to the modem once it's powered up via:

screen /dev/ttyUSB2 115200

Disconnect by CTRL+a k.

Setting up the modem for voice calling

Once per a lifetime you have to run AT+QDAI=1,0,0,2,0,1,1,1 and reboot the modem. That will configure audio on the modem side correctly and store the configuration persistently inside the modem. This is not necessary if you use my modem driver.

To setup audio for call use my call audio setup program.

You need to run the program after the call starts twice. Once with your desired audio setup without -2 option and once with -2 option.

To answer a call type ATA, to make a call ATDsomenumber;, to hangup ATH.

That's it. ;)

Modem reverse engineering

See this page for details.

Unlock ADB access

It's possible to access the Linux side of the modem via adb, or reboot the modem to fastboot mode and boot your own kernel, The modem is rooted by default, and you can install and run your own software inside the modem. It's possible to communicate between A64 and the modem's ARM CPU via USB serial port (ttyGS0 on modem side and ttyUSB1 on A64).

It's also possible to create your own URCs up to 128B in size by sending them as a datagram message to UNIX socket /tmp/.urc_sock. See urc.c.

To install your own program on the modem persistently you need to remount modem's root filesystem read write and install your program somewhere in /usr/bin. Add your startup script to /etc/init.d.

To get adb access to the modem:

On Arch Linux ARM, adb is no longer supported, so you need to compile it from source code. You can use https://github.com/…uong/arm_adb with this patch to make it work with current openssl.

Modem power management

Various PinePhone variants have SoC GPIOs routed to the modem differently. So you need to be aware of what PinePhone variant you have, when experimenting with the modem.

Power management comes down to:

Summay of modem's be­havior related to powerup/po­werdown and power management: