Thanks, everyone, for reporting about this problem.
We believe we have fixes for the current high CPU reports on N5 due to
mm-qcamera-daemon, and they will be included in the next maintenance
update. At this point, we don't need more reports of the problem, with
some exceptions I'll detail below.
More details:
We've had scattered reports of persistent high CPU usage of
mm-qcamera-daemon since our last maintenance update, and based on
those, found a number of bugs that were then fixed.
More recently, there's been a significant increase in the frequency of
reported problems. These may be related to a recent update to Skype,
which seems to access the camera regularly from its background service
in some way that triggers this bug (note, we don't currently believe
there's a bug in Skype itself). Investigating this, we've identified a
few additional fixes that we hope resolve this issue for good.
However, since the high CPU usage is an intermittent problem, we're
continuing to test our fixes to verify the problems are gone.
Unfortunately, I can't provide an estimate for when the maintenance
update will be ready, due to all the testing we need to do for this
and other fixes. Until then, rebooting the phone is the only way to
stop the high CPU usage/lack of camera function once it starts.
Uninstalling Skype may substantially reduce the likelihood of this bug
appearing, but I realize Skype is a very important application for
many people. Other camera-using applications may trigger this bug as
well, but that's been relatively rare. Most applications also do not
access the camera when not in the foreground, so they will only
trigger issues when actively used.
I'd also like to note that instances of high CPU use of
mm-qcamera-daemon on other devices besides the N5 need to be reported
to their manufacturers - while those devices also use a Qualcomm chip
for their camera processing (and thus have a mm-qcamera-daemon
process), each has differences in their software and issues with them
do not necessarily mean the N5 has the same problem, and vice versa.
If you are seeing high CPU use of mm-qcamera-daemon, and you have not
used the camera at all, or installed an application like Skype that
has a background service that accesses the camera (typically,
applications that provide video chat may do this), we would like to
know about it.
Otherwise, for Skype and other typical camera applications, we believe
we have fixes identified, and you don't need to add more information
to this bug - remember, any note added here will send updates to
dozens of people.
