[PATCH] rtc: mv: reset date if after year 2038

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Dear Josh Cartwright,

On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 13:11:11 -0600, Josh Cartwright wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:26:06PM +0100, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> > Dates after January, 19th 2038 are badly handled by userspace due to
> > the time being stored on 32 bits. This causes issues on some Marvell
> > platform on which the RTC is initialized by default to a date that's
> > beyond 2038, causing a really weird behavior of the RTC.
> > 
> > In order to avoid that, reset the date to a sane value if the RTC is
> > beyond 2038.
> 
> Just so I better understand: is this really a problem that is unique to
> this particular RTC?  It smells a bit like we're papering over a problem
> that may exist for other RTCs as well, and if so, is better solved in
> the core.

I'd say it depends on how the RTC internally encodes the date. Some RTC
may have an internal date representation that allows to represent dates
past 2^32 seconds after Epoch, while maybe some RTC do not.

However, it is true that a fairly large number of RTC drivers seem to
use the bcd2bin() function, which indicates the RTC internally uses a
BCD representation, which allows to represent dates past 2^32 seconds
after Epoch.

That being said, I don't think the RTC core has any knowledge of what
the internal RTC representation of time is, so I don't know how the
core could fix things up without this information.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com