hwclock/rtc under Debian Etch

[Ralph Siemsen]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 04:14:07PM -0500, Ralph Siemsen wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 09:32:58PM -0330, Chad House wrote:
> 
> > The off-the-shelf Debian footbridge kernel (2.6.18-5) has
> > the RTC support built as modules; none are loaded by default, and the
> > kernel's drivers/rtc subdirectory contains
> 
> Try drivers/char/rtc.ko if you have it.  You want the old simple RTC
> driver, not the new fancy ones from drivers/rtc.  At some point, the
> even newer drivers/rtc/rtc-cmos (which you do not appear to have) may
> work as well.

Hmm, it looks like in 2.6.16 or thereabouts, drivers/char/rtc was
disabled for ARM architecture in Kconfig.  So, given you are on
2.6.18, in theory you should use the "new" rtc-cmos driver.  The
only complication being that this did not show up in your list...

I've just tested it out under the current 2.6.24 kernel.  Using
rtc-cmos and rtc-dev works, with one complication: the driver seems
to allocate a dynamic major number (I ended up with major=254, minor=0).
Once i manually fixed up my /dev/rtc with these values, then "hwclock"
worked as normal.  I suspect this wouldn't be an issue if I used
devfs/udev, but my ancient netwinder disk image lacks this support.

-R