How to handle a modem that stops responding...

[Jessy Exum]

Thanks for the information.

It is good to know that this has been considered in the core design. I
agree that there should be no modem specific behavior for this.

I will try to get a device in this failed state and diagnose why it is not
being released.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 3:24 AM Aleksander Morgado <aleksander at aleksander.es>
wrote:

> Hey Jessy
>
> > I am working with some Cinterion modems (PLAS9) and have seen them lock
> up completely (requiring a hard reset as the AT channel does not even
> accept commands anymore).
> >
> > The reason I am posting about this here is that ModemManager doesn't
> realize the modem is gone. Every message sent to the modem will fail to
> send or timeout, but ModemManager will continue showing the last state of
> the modem before it stopped responding.
> >
> > I am happy to do the work to make ModemManager respond more sanely to
> this situation, but I want to make sure that whatever I do follows agreed
> upon best practices, and that I don't introduce too strange behavior for a
> single family of modems. If the agreed upon fix can be done to some of the
> modem base classes, that would be even better (consistency).
> >
>
> ModemManager already should detect stale AT ports, and after 10
> consecutive AT commands timing out, it flags the port as unusable and
> trigger a device re-probe.
>
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/blob/master/src/mm-base-modem.c#L134
>
> In your setup, when the problem with the stale AT port happens, are
> you waiting for MM to send 10 AT commands and get 10 timeouts?
>
> > My initial thought is detecting if the AT Channel is unreachable for a
> time, to drop and re-enumerate the device. If there is a failure to
> reenumerate, that at least shows that the modem is not just sitting there
> in a connected state, or whatever it was before the crash.
>
> ModemManager should flag the modem as unusable and attempts to
> re-probe the ports right away, and if that doesn't work, the modem
> won't be exported in DBus. I don't think MM should do any kind of
> attempt to recover the modem; as that is very system specific and
> would require quite some user configuration. If you're building your
> own system, you should probably detect that the modem is suddenly no
> longer exposed in DBus, and act accordingly (e.g. attempt forcing the
> USB re-enumeration, or fully power off and on the device externally
> via GPIO, or whatever other thing your system could do).
>
> --
> Aleksander
> https://aleksander.es
>
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