rtc-twl: catch22 in 2.6.37 and 2.6.38 when clock was never set

From: Alexander Holler
Date: Mon Apr 04 2011 - 10:29:18 EST


Hello,

it just happened here that the rechargeable backup battery for the RTC on a TPS65950 run out off power, because of some days while the device wasn't powered.

Afterwards I couldn't read or set the clock with hwclock using a kernel 2.6.37.n or 2.6.38.n.

I don't have a fix, but I think I've analyzed the problem and can offer a (bad) workaround.

What happens is the following:

When trying to read or set the clock with hwclock, the driver (rtc-twl) starts an alarm, but the irq for the alarm will never get called. The result is that a select in hwclock times out (for both operations, read or set).

Because I had this clock running before, I've got the idea to try one of those old OMAP-kernels (2.6.32-angstrom) using the same userland.
And with that kernel I could set the clock.
Using 2.6.37 or 2.6.38 afterwards, hwclock did function again, both read an set are working.

So it looks like there is a catch22 in kernels >=2.6.37 (I haven't tested .33-.36):

When the clock was never set, the alarm(-irq) doesn't work, so hwclock doesn't work, so one can't set the clock.

Regards,

Alexander Holler
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