At 6:00 AM, she checked the battery graph: . Fixed. Part V: The Gray Zone The fix worked. But it was a “proprietary modification” to MediaTek’s binary-licensed driver—technically a violation of their software agreement.

/* FIXME: PM_QoS voting mismatch if DVFS table > 4 cores. -SJL, 2022-12-01 */ The fix note was from December 2022—just weeks before the driver was finalized. And it was never resolved.

/* * Fixed: December 2023. * If you are reading this in 2025 and battery drain returns, * look for new PM_QoS votes. They multiply like rabbits. * - Lena Wei, last commit of the year. */ And somewhere in MediaTek’s Hsinchu office, Dr. Chen quietly merged Lena’s fix into the 2024 driver branch, pretending he had written it himself. Because in the world of chipset drivers, credit is fleeting—but a working phone is forever.

Every time the phone went to sleep, the driver voted for maximum DDR frequency . And because the vote was never cleared, the memory controller ran at full speed all night.