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

From: Alexander Holler
Date: Tue Apr 05 2011 - 06:14:33 EST


Hello,

Am 04.04.2011 16:29, schrieb Alexander Holler:

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.

It turns out that the missing/wrong initialization of the msecure line is the problem which disabled setting the clock. After doing that through a quick hack, I could set the clock.

I'm using a BeagleBoard C4, but I can't find any msecure initialization for other boards too.

What happened with those patches? E.g. those:

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-omap@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg16125.html

Regards,

Alexander
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