The README had grown to 422 lines: the device and carrier table came
after 61 lines of architecture, and the configuration section after 237
lines of architecture, that table, build, run and packaging notes and
GNOME Calls detail.
AGENTS.md, a file for coding agents, takes that detail and adds to it: a
reference to the tree at this commit, written from the code and the
bench record. The README is now what a person needs: what imsd is and
its status, the verified device/carrier table, what it needs, how to
install and enable it, the two dialers, a status check for the installed
daemon, a `Not there yet` list, and where the rest is.
In-tree comments that sent readers to README sections which moved — the
cross-compiling flow (the CI workflow, build-package.sh,
APKBUILD.binary), GNOME Calls' known gaps (imsd-ofono-restart-calls.sh),
the D-Bus ABI (main.cpp) and the Configuration section (imsd.service) —
point at AGENTS.md's sections now.
The system-bus policies granted net.catcrafts.IMS1 and org.ofono to root
and to the account `user`, postmarketOS's default name, so on a unit
whose account is called something else dbus denied every Dial from the
dialer — nothing in imsd's journal, nothing on screen. A field user
found it by trial (alyx report 14, 2026-09-20; ims ledger F14).
Let any local account reach both names and have the daemons decide:
placing, answering or ending a call needs polkit's
net.catcrafts.IMS1.Voice (the active local session; not an ssh login, an
inactive session or a system service account). imsd-ofonod asks about
its own callers, since its calls reach imsd as root. Reads such as the
status and the call list are not gated, and a refusal is logged with the
sender; a `--session` run, the development mode without root or polkit,
leaves the gate off. The check is ImsdBus, a small GLib module both
daemons link; the package depends on polkit.
An upgrade restarts both daemons (the previous commit), so the open
policy faces the old, ungated daemons only until the apk transaction
ends.
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
An upgrade left the old imsd and imsd-ofonod running until they were
next restarted, while a changed bus policy is live the moment apk writes
it: dbus-broker-launch reloads on its own. A policy that relies on a
check inside the daemons would face the old daemons in between.
Mark imsd.service and imsd-ofonod.service needs-restart in post-upgrade
scripts; the systemd trigger restarts them once the transaction is done
(enqueue-marked). A call in progress ends. The same scripts run as
post-install: `apk del` removes a package's files and leaves its daemon
running, so a later `apk add` of the package is this upgrade for that
daemon — and apk runs the post-install script, not post-upgrade, for a
package it adds. GNOME Calls 50.0 dials nothing after imsd-ofonod
restarts under it until it restarts too, so imsd-ofonod's ExecStartPost
restarts the Calls daemon of each user running one — not at the unit's
first start since boot, when a Calls that runs already is left alone.
A daemon older than 0.3.10 kept its bring-up throttle wait in memory
only, so a restart lost it. imsd's post-upgrade records that daemon's
invocation, and imsd-handover.sh, an ExecStartPre after ims-pdn-up.sh,
reads the invocation's journal and, while the fresh-SA throttle's wait
it finds there still runs (`spi-s=0`; the old daemon's other deferrals
are not handed over), writes what is left of it to the holds file when
this start's LOCAL is the address the wait was earned on, or when that
address cannot be read; when LOCAL is another address, only the verdict
that the old registration is gone.
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
imsd-media defaulted AUDIO_USER to `user`, postmarketOS's default
account name, and with no such account a call had no audio on the phone
and noise at the far end, the message only in imsd-media's stderr, at
each call. A field user found it by trial (alyx report 14, 2026-09-20;
ims ledger F14).
Have imsd, as packaged (root, on the system bus), resolve the session
from logind when a call's media starts — the user session active on
seat0 (a greeter is not one) when it has a PipeWire socket — and hand it
to imsd-media as AUDIO_USER; set in imsd's own environment to an
account's name, AUDIO_USER pins that account instead. imsd as packaged
(root, on the system bus) logs the resolution at start, before the first
call, and when a call's media starts.
No session is an empty AUDIO_USER. imsd-media started without the
variable at all keeps `user`: that is an imsd older than 0.3.10, still
running while an upgrade replaces the helper under it, whose calls would
otherwise be silent until the restart, or a hand run.
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
imsd took the first global IPv6 on the ims netdev as its address, and
the kernel lists the temporary (privacy) SLAAC address first: `temporary
dynamic`, preferred for a day and valid for two by its lifetimes (read
2026-09-24). Contact, Via and the four SAs were bound to it, so once the
kernel removes it the registration has lost its address. The address
ModemManager assigned — the one the script installs — sat third on the
list. Seen on the dev phone; a field unit's journal shows the split too
— imsd registered on an address other than the one the script installed
(ims ledger F18).
Hand the assigned address to the daemon as LOCAL through /run/imsd.env,
next to DEV. For a manual run without it, prefer a global address that
is neither `temporary` nor `dynamic`, then any non-temporary one.
A restart after the upgrade finds the registration's SAs on the old
address. It resumes there while that address is still on the link, and
moves to the PDN's address in place: with its next fresh registration,
or when the old address leaves the link first. When the address it is
registered on leaves the netdev and the PDN's own address is not there
to move to, a registered imsd exits at its next recovery step, non-zero,
for a systemd restart, which runs the PDN bring-up again.
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
The reg-event subscription is the network's own account of our binding
(TS 24.229 5.1.1.3), and the daemon opened a new dialog for it at every
refresh and reconnect and otherwise never looked back: a refused
SUBSCRIBE was forgotten, an unanswered one had no timeout, an ended
subscription got nothing until the next refresh's new dialog, and a
NOTIFY was logged whatever it said. O2 UK, 2026-09-24: a fresh
registration's SUBSCRIBE got 500, a NOTIFY arrived all the same and
showed our contact active, the flow died eight seconds after the 200 and
no connect over the SA succeeded after that; the 500 was logged and
nothing was done about it.
Keep the subscription alive: retry a refused or unanswered SUBSCRIBE on
a backoff, renew one the S-CSCF ends with deactivated, timeout, giveup
or probation (RFC 6665 4.1.3; after any other reason, or none, the next
refresh subscribes anew), and subscribe anew ahead of the lifetime the
S-CSCF granted. A refresh or a reconnect opens no dialog while imsd
holds one for the registration or has a retry scheduled.
Read the reginfo for our own contact and act on its state: a NOTIFY that
terminates our binding schedules a fresh registration — at once for
deactivated or expired, after the network's retry-after (up to an hour)
for probation, on imsd's own refusal schedule (21 min, growing to 60)
for rejected or unregistered (RFC 3680). A hold already running stands,
and a REGISTER wait a call kept open that still gets its 200 after such
a NOTIFY leaves that registration standing. The parser is in Imsd:Sip
and pinned by tests/Sip with the O2 document shapes; the policy is
RegRecovery's (OnBindingTerminated, added here with its tests in
tests/Engine).
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
After bring-up the daemon recovered a dead protected flow by
reconnecting through the existing SA and refreshing, on a 5 s → 5 min
backoff, forever. That was the whole recovery: a refresh the network
refused, or a P-CSCF that stopped answering, kept it in that loop on the
same Call-ID and SA until someone restarted the service. O2 UK,
2026-09-24: the 30-minute refresh answered 503, 21 refusals over 70 min;
after a manual restart the new registration's flow died 8 s in and no
connect over its SA succeeded for 2 h 39 min; a second restart
registered within two seconds (13:27:55 → 13:27:57 in the journal; ims
ledger F16).
Do in place the rest of what a restart does: when the refresh keeps
being refused, or reconnect cycles keep ending without an answer unless
the modem reports no packet service, register fresh. The fresh
registration is the expensive step, so a failed one waits before the
next: on a schedule (21 min, growing to 60) after a refusal or a
throttle, on a backoff after silence, and a Retry-After from the network
is honoured up to an hour. What the network set — a Retry-After, the
schedule after a refused or throttled attempt — is kept across a restart
in /run/imsd.holds, for the address it was set on. A refused initial
registration at bring-up — a final from 300 up to the unprotected
REGISTER (its 401 is the challenge), any final but 200 to the protected
one, a second 401 (rejected credentials) included — now waits on the
same schedule instead of exiting for a systemd restart every two minutes.
The policy is a pure reducer in Imsd:Engine (RegRecovery), shaped like
the call machine: the daemon supplies the clock and the network, the
reducer holds the deadlines and names the next step, and tests/Engine
pin it. tests/Engine now exits 0 or 1 instead of its failure count: with
more than 255 checks a count of 256 would exit 0, and crafter-build
reads 77 as a skipped suite. The bring-up's deferral is logged in the
policy's form: `bring-up deferred: <why> — attempt N, next fresh
registration in M min` becomes `bring-up deferred: <why>; next: fresh
registration in M min`.
A bring-up writes the verdict that the old registration is gone as well:
a start that goes on to register fresh — its resume failed, or there was
nothing to resume over — records it before the attempt, and when the
attempt then fails without an answer the daemon exits with the file in
place. The next start on the same address and boot does not resume,
where 0.3.9 retried the resume: it registers fresh at once. On KPN, with
the old registration in fact still live — a start during an outage,
staged on the dev phone — that attempt was throttled, and the 21-min
schedule began. A bring-up does not retry its resume through an outage
the way recovery reconnects.
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
A refused final was logged as its bare status code ("re-REGISTER failed
503", "reg-event SUBSCRIBE -> 500") — the unprotected REGISTER's as
"expected 401", without even the code — so a field journal could not say
which node refused or what it said. O2 UK answered a phone's 30-minute
refresh with 503 twenty-one times over seventy minutes and then refused
a fresh registration's reg-event SUBSCRIBE with 500 (alyx, 2026-09-24);
the journal holds nothing but the numbers.
Log the status line with the headers that carry the reason —
Retry-After, Warning, Reason, Server — for a REGISTER's refused final
(initial, protected, refresh) and for a refused SUBSCRIBE the run loop
reads, and dump the refused message under DUMP_SIP as its own fail dump
next to the 200s.
To tell a REGISTER's final from what else arrives, the final is now
matched by Call-ID and CSeq, and a request that arrives on the client
flow while one is awaited is dispatched: a refresh no longer reads such
a request as a failed REGISTER. An INVITE among those requests is a call
like any other, announced on the bus: a Dial whose reconnect it arrived
under meets the call-in-progress rule again before it places its own,
and when a resume, a refresh or a reconnect fails the call that arrived
under it ends with the flow it came in on (486 while the flow still
carries one, and the bus told). The unprotected REGISTER's reply is
matched the same way on the init port.
Tested on the dev phone (KPN) in builds of this series; not every path
has run there.
A P-CSCF may answer the challenge with every mechanism it supports and
attach the SPIs and ports to the one it applied. O2 UK's core lists six
ipsec-3gpp entries with q-values, md5 first, and marks the fourth (sha1,
no ealg). imsd took the first ealg= anywhere in the header - the 3DES of
an entry the P-CSCF had not selected - and installed SAs the far end
could not decrypt: every protected packet after the 401 was dropped at
its IPsec layer, over TCP and UDP alike, with nothing to answer.
The 401 handling now parses the Security-Server as a mechanism list
(commas outside quotes, parameters on semicolons, names and values
case-insensitive) and selects the highest-q ipsec-3gpp mechanism that
matches what Security-Client offered (RFC 3329 2.3.1, TS 24.229
5.1.1.5.1): alg equal to ours, ealg (absent = null) equal to the offer.
The SPIs and ports are per registration and come from the entry carrying
them. When no entry matches the offer, the entry carrying the SPIs is
installed as listed and the journal says so; hmac-md5-96 becomes
hmac(md5) with IK as the key. A single-mechanism header selects itself:
on KPN the SAs are the same as before (unit-pinned argv, verified on the
phone). An answer that cannot be used - no ipsec-3gpp entry, a missing
spi/port, an alg, ealg, prot or mod the kernel cannot be handed - defers
the bring-up on the throttle schedule with the reason, before the AKA is
spent, instead of a fatal that would restart imsd every RestartSec with
an initial REGISTER each time; spi-s=0 stays the throttle deferral.
Repeated Security-Server header lines are joined into the one list
Security-Verify echoes.
The journal shows the Security-Server line, the selected mechanism, the
SA parameters, and any ip xfrm command that fails (keys masked) at every
fresh registration - the silence this bug produced had no line to read.
imsd's protected leg (the second REGISTER and everything after it) was
TCP only. A P-CSCF that never answers the TCP connect on its protected
server port (O2 UK: the SYNs leave ESP-protected, nothing comes back)
left the unit looping with no way forward, although the SAs, the
listener sockets and the firewall rule already covered UDP.
The client flow now carries a transport. UDP binds the same protected
client port and connect()s the datagram socket to the P-CSCF's protected
server port, so the kernel delivers that peer's datagrams to it ahead of
the unconnected listener on the same port. One datagram is one message
(RFC 3261 18.3: a Content-Length that fits truncates, one that does not
fit discards the datagram, none means the rest of the datagram); a
receive error is logged and marks the flow dead; a message over the
single-packet ESP budget at the ims PDN's MTU is logged once per flow,
since the kernel fragments it and a P-CSCF may drop the fragments.
Every protected request's Via follows the transport; the challenge
stays UDP.
SIP_TRANSPORT selects the policy: auto (default) registers over TCP and,
after two unanswered connects, registers again over UDP (new challenge,
new SA pair) - but only on a phone whose state file does not record a
successful TCP registration, so an outage on a TCP carrier never becomes
a second initial REGISTER; a phone whose last registration was UDP goes
straight to UDP. tcp and udp force one. A connect refused locally
(EADDRNOTAVAIL: the 4-tuple still in TIME_WAIT from the previous flow)
keeps retrying and is not counted as silence; SO_ERROR results are
logged by name. The registration's transport is persisted so a warm
resume reconnects the same way, and the resume gives up after two
silences.
Two things the change exposed and fixes: an engine-fatal event exited 0
("exiting for systemd restart" with Restart=on-failure never firing),
and a fresh registration refused with the P-CSCF's fresh-SA throttle
(Security-Server spi-s=0) must not be retried by a 120-s restart loop,
since every attempt re-arms the ~20-min window - it is now waited out
in-process, growing on repeats, with D-Bus commands still served. A
resume the network refuses falls through to a fresh registration. A
retransmitted 200 OK to our INVITE is ACKed again and no longer starts
a second media leg.
Verified on KPN: resume over TCP after a binary swap, MT and MO calls
with media both ways, the throttle deferral and its self-recovery, the
UDP client path up to KPN dropping the datagram. The UDP success path
is a field test; SIP retransmission timers over UDP are not in this
change.
0.3.3 plus: our requests are signed with the registered public identity
instead of the IMSI-derived temporary IMPU (the caller-ID leak a Telia
P-CSCF exposed), the identity survives a warm resume, and DUMP_SIP also
keeps the last outgoing INVITE.
Every request we originated — INVITE, CANCEL, both ACKs, in-dialog BYE and
friends — put the IMSI-derived temporary IMPU in From. 3GPP allows that
identity in REGISTER only; the same lesson was learned for the reg-event
SUBSCRIBE (480) and never carried to calls. Most P-CSCFs overwrite From
and hid it; a Telia node did not, and a reporter's IMSI appeared on the
callee's screen (field report 2026-09-01). A strict P-CSCF may reject the
INVITE outright.
CallerId(): the registered sip: public identity (P-Associated-URI), else
the tel: one, and the temporary IMPU only before either is learned. One
helper feeds all five builders, so a dialog's From never drifts. As UAS the
dialog's local URI is the INVITE's To (RFC 3261 12.2.1.1), stored on the
Dialog, so an incoming call's BYE is signed the way the network addressed
us. The identity is persisted in the state file and restored on warm
resume, so a call placed before the refresh 200 re-learns it cannot fall
back. DUMP_SIP now also writes the last outgoing INVITE
(imsd-invite-out.raw): the one request a field log could never show.
The byte-pinned INVITE fixture moves to the tel: identity its test context
knows; new scenarios cover the sip: identity, the tel: fallback, the
pre-learning case and the UAS BYE.
Bench-verified on KPN 2026-09-08: outgoing INVITE From is the registered
sip: identity, call accepted and carried; caller ID at the far end
unchanged.
0.3.2 plus the media fix: the audio user is resolved once and thread-safely,
so an answered call can no longer land its PipeWire helpers in the wrong
runtime directory and play static.
Landline callers ring. The media leg plays AMR narrowband and G.711
(PCMA/PCMU) as well as AMR-WB, the engine accepts any of them from an
inbound offer (case-insensitive names, static G.711 payload types) and
names the offered codecs when it still has to refuse with 488. An inbound
INVITE is validated before it is announced to the UI, so a refused call no
longer flashes the dialer. Our own offer lists AMR narrowband after AMR-WB,
so a call to a landline no longer depends on the network transcoding up.
CODECS=<list> restricts and orders the codecs offered and accepted, for
bench work against networks that transcode every caller to AMR-WB.
Bench-verified on KPN 2026-09-08: PCMA and AMR-NB in both directions, the
default incoming path still AMR-WB, a mobile caller's offer still answered
with octet-aligned AMR-WB.
Packaging: cross-compiled for the FP6's Cortex-A520/A720 cores; the aport
is gone, fp6-img installs this repo's published apk.
KPN's interconnect gateway transcodes every caller up: a G.711-only
fixed-line INVITE reached the phone offering PCMA, PCMU, AMR and AMR-WB
(bench call 2026-09-08), so the AMR-WB-only build rang and the narrowband
path — the one the Telia field report hit with 488 — cannot be reached on
the air through KPN by any caller.
CODECS=<list> (comma-separated over AMR-WB, AMR/AMR-NB, PCMA, PCMU) makes
the list both the codecs offered on an outgoing call and the acceptance
preference for an inbound offer, in that order: CODECS=PCMA takes G.711
A-law out of the mixed offer above, CODECS=PCMA,PCMU sends a G.711-only
offer toward the network. Unset, nothing changes — the default offer
bytes and the AMR-WB > AMR > PCMA > PCMU preference stay pinned. The
daemon logs an active override at startup.
OnIncomingInvite() posted CallAdded, then ran the engine's OnInvite(),
which is where the offer is validated. For a refused offer (488) the bus
saw CallAdded -> CallStateChanged(terminated) -> CallDeleted within one
Execute() — a 24 ms burst — while the engine comment three lines above the
488 promised the refusal lands 'before the UI ever rings'.
Field report 2026-09-01: kde-telephony-daemon reacted to the CallAdded by
launching Plasma Dialer as a lock-screen overlay, which came up half a
second later to an empty call list and never left; the user rebooted.
Run OnInvite() first and announce the call only if the machine survived
it. A refused call is answered and dropped with no bus events at all
(Execute(actions, announce=false)); the journal keeps the record — caller
and reason are already logged.
imsd-media spoke exactly one codec, AMR-WB. A landline caller reaches the
IMS core through the PSTN gateway, which offers narrowband — AMR (NB)
and/or G.711 — so with the engine now accepting those offers the media leg
has to play them.
CODEC (set by the daemon from the negotiated SDP) selects AMR-WB (the
default, unchanged), AMR, PCMA or PCMU. AMR narrowband rides the same RFC
4867 payload code as AMR-WB with its own frame-size table (RFC 4867 table
1) and libopencore-amrnb dlopen'd like the wideband pair — same package as
the AMR-WB decoder, no new dependency; AMR_MODE defaults to 7 (12.2 kbit/s)
for it. G.711 is the ITU-T table codec, raw samples in the payload, digital
zero as keepalive. The narrowband path runs pw-record/pw-play at 8 kHz and
steps the RTP clock by 160 per frame.
Two test seams so the leg can be driven against a synthetic RTP peer with
no PipeWire and no network: MIC_SRC=<file> feeds raw PCM through the
encoder in real time instead of pw-record, PCM_DUMP=1 writes the decoded
downlink to <out>.pcm. --selftest now covers both AMR tables (both payload
formats) and G.711 (digital zero, idempotence over the full 16-bit range,
1 kHz sine SNR >= 30 dB for both laws).
Verified on the workstation with a Python gateway stand-in for PCMA, PCMU
and AMR (octet-aligned and bandwidth-efficient): uplink RTP shape (pt, seq,
ts step 160, payload sizes 160 / 33 / 32) and a 440 Hz mic tone recovered
from our packets by an independent decoder; a 1 kHz gateway tone recovered
from our decoded downlink. The AMR-WB default path keeps its legacy
keepalive shape (ts step 320, FT0 payloads 19/18 bytes).
packaging/aport/ is now the canonical apk packaging, moved here from
fp6-img so the daemon and its package live and version together —
fp6-img's build.sh consumes this directory instead of carrying its own
copy (it pins _commit and generates the source tarball, as before).
0.3.1 ships the ims-pdn-up hardening (visible mmcli errors, registration
gate, configurable ip-type) and the TimeoutStartSec bump that goes with
it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Classify 112/911 (plus EMERGENCY_NUMBERS) at Dial. A classified call
INVITEs urn:service:sos over the existing registration and, on any
non-2xx final not caused by the user hanging up (including the
setup-timeout CANCEL paths), retries once as a plain INVITE of the
dialled digits — the pre-0.3.0 behavior, so classification can never
place a call worse than the status quo. The reverse edge: a 380
Alternative Service whose body carries the emergency indication
upgrades an unclassified call to the sos URN; a bare 380 stays an
error, since promoting an arbitrary redirect would put a
non-emergency call through to a PSAP. An emergency dial preempts an
in-progress call, and an answer racing a deadline-initiated CANCEL is
taken instead of BYE'd (user-initiated CANCEL races still BYE).
No emergency registration, no emergency PDN, no CS fallback, no
SIM-less calling, no AML — and no carrier has confirmed the sos path
end-to-end. The README warning states exactly that.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Userspace VoLTE/IMS daemon for mainline Linux phones (developed on the
Fairphone 6): a GLib-free core (SIP, SDP, USIM AKA, IPsec SA setup, RTP
media, call engine) behind a GDBus control daemon, a standalone AMR-WB
media leg, and a Plasma Dialer backend. C++26 modules built with Crafter
Build; the tree is clean under the project's house-style linter
(crafter-build lint) across all three build products.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Jorijn van der Graaf <jorijnvdgraaf@catcrafts.net>
