hwclock/rtc under Debian Etch

[Chad House]

On Jan 27, 2008 7:47 PM, Ralph Siemsen <ralphs at netwinder.org> wrote:
[...]
> 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...

Yep, it seems there were some issues with the rtc-cmos patch on ARM
leading up to the 2.6.20 time frame, e.g., this message from Woody
Suwalski:

    http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/9/190

> 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.

No worries, I'll build a newer kernel. Fairly minor issue, anyway,
since it's rebooted so infrequently (and can run a *long* time on a
decent size UPS in the event of a power outage).

Thanks again for your help,

Chad