Hazem Hagrass

Software Engineer

Technical Lead

Hazem Hagrass
Hazem Hagrass
Hazem Hagrass
Hazem Hagrass

Software Engineer

Technical Lead

Blog Post

After Bootloop Issues, Nexus6P is back from the GRAVEYARD

August 3, 2017 Mobile
After Bootloop Issues, Nexus6P is back from the GRAVEYARD

Several Smartphones models introduced between 2015, 2016 as Nexus 6p and 5X discovered by users to have a common problem. All of which eventually cause the device to be unstable and stuck in a loop or Reboot or won’t turn on. This issue had been nicknamed as boot loop which affected a lot of Nexus smartphones, especially Nexus 6p and 5X

When!

Seems that a loose connection between the power supply or memory components could cause a phone to fail to boot up. This is because of the mobile system’s stability or not being able to access memory.

Last year we heard reports that some Nexus 6P owners were reporting After upgrading to Andriod N on the 6p. Many users have been plagued that their phones were stuck in a boot loop which effectively rendered them useless. All of This has resulted in lawsuits being considered and until now an actual fix for the problem has yet to be released by Google or HUAWEI. HUAWEI has claimed software is the culprit and Google has stated that it’s the hardware.

I’ve tried a clean install of the ROM, Dirty flashing the ROM, and clearing the caches without any luck to get it working. I tried to contact Google and Huawei but unfortunately, all I got was that I should replace the device with a new one if it’s in the guarantee period, If not then they can’t do anything which was not acceptable to me because I’m mainly located in Egypt and it will be really hard to deliver this device to them.

Solution!

For being brief, here is the solution (hopefully) for the boot loop issue on Github, however, I prefer to go deeper in detail to fully understand what is happening!

Nexus 6p Normal Boot

Going Deep!

The solution is based on deeply understanding Nexus6p architecture and specs. Nexus6P has an octa-core Snapdragon 810 v2.1 system-on-chip (SoC) with four ARM Cortex-A57 cores at 1.95 GHz and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores at 1.55 GHz in a big.LITTLE architecture. The SOC includes an Adreno 430 GPU including support up to OpenGL ES 3.1.

Thankfully XCnathan32 with some XDA developers has rallied together for now. It seems like a fix. Founding this fix does come at a cost in terms of performance as it mainly disables four of the ARM Cortex-A57 cores on the Qualcomm snapdragon 810 chipset, unlike the ARM Cortex-A53 cores which are left alone. So most probably a lag will be noticed when experiencing the phone, especially on UI if you are a heavy user. The good news is that the battery should be slightly improved because of disabling  ARM Cortex-A57  cores and because those ARM Cortex-A53 cores are more power-efficient. At least your device is back from the graveyard and working again.

It’s highly recommended that a developer should run this solution. Since the main script file may fail and sometimes it needs a development sense to know what is wrong related to the environment and get things fixed on the right track.

Interestingly enough, the same XDA user who has the main credit here XCnathan32 had also reported a fix for the Nexus 5X, which has its own share of boot loop issues. but I never tested honestly because I don’t have any 5X devices.

Regardless, if you are at your wit’s end with your Nexus6P’s or Nexus5X’s boot loop issues, your other alternative is to pay attention to lawsuits against Huawei, Google, and LG over these issues.

This advice is provided without warranty or any guarantee that it’ll work for you but hopefully, it will work smoothly. all steps and prerequisites are posted in this GitHub repo, feel free to change or update with your experience.

Write a comment