[LV] [RFC] RTC/TOY cleanup: move to new RTC API

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 15:24:37 +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki <macro at linux-mips.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Kenn Humborg wrote:
> > In our case, we should probably write the current year to a known
> > place in the kernel image.
> 
>  I'd recommend an unused location of NVRAM if available in a given system 
> (a working trick might be to use the console variable that specifies 
> kernel arguments; there's probably a firmware-to-kernel ABI to access it) 
> or a file under /etc (updated regularly with `cron' or however).  Network 
> boots could use MOP to retrieve the remote time initially, but if a 
> network is available, then *the* solution is NTP.

Whee... What do we actually have? We've potentially got some
battery-backed RAM. I don't think that firmware variables will work.
My understanding is that these are quite hard-wired in the Chevron.

Since the battery-backed RAM is only one kilobyte, I'm not sure if
we'd use it at all. (I actually thought about writing eg. a console
driver that writes Oopses to it, similar to what is done on PA-RISC.)

My current thought about it is to use a module/kernel parameter to
supply the RTC driver with an initial year value, and to allow to
modify it afterwards (by sysfs.)

MfG, JBG

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