826097 - geolocation doesn't turn off while Gaia camera app is running

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Geolocation, defect)

Description

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

The Gaia camera app calls getCurrentPosition() once every 10 minutes.  (That is broken and it should be changed to use watchPosition(), but that is a separate bug).

But it looks like the GPS hardware never spins down.  In logcat, I see GPS-related messages once a second, and they seem to go on for at least 5 minutes. They do stop when I kill the camera app, though.

Comment 1

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

Attachment: logcat

This is adb logcat | grep LocSvc while I launched the camera, let it run for 10 seconds or so, and then killed the camera.

It shows GPS startup and shutdown, and updates every second.  Those 1 second updates seem to go on forever while the camera is running, which is surprising since the camera does not use watchPosition().

Comment 2

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

Nominating this as blocking so that the risk to battery life can be assesed in triage.

Comment 3

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

basecamp- based on the current information. Please renom if this can be proven to have serious implications on battery life.

Comment 4

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Garvan: do you think this camera app bug reported on B2G 1.1 in 2013 is still relevant on B2G 2.1?

Comment 5

[:garvan]

The geolocation service (side note: this is a singleton, and on B2G is persistent) shuts down its provider after a timeout. 
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/src/geolocation/nsGeolocation.cpp#873

The provider is a layer above the GPS hardware interface, so that lower level could stay alive. Agreed that GPS is an expensive chip to keep awake. This would need to be researched further to see if it still happens.

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Closing as we are not working on Firefox OS anymore.