From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; COM+ 1.0.2204) On two out of three of our Tyan S2510 and four of eight SuperMicro P6DGE dual PIII motherboards, hwclock hangs when run, including at boot. Ctrl-C will abort this step, but then it gets hung up indefinitely again when starting up the system logger. Ctrl-\ will abort this step and allows the system to boot completely, but the system clock is, of course, not initialized. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. attempt to boot.
I second that. I have a system with Asus A7V133 w/audio, Athlon 850 Mhz, Diamond S540 (Savage4). Honestly I think it might be hardware problem, but the CMOS clock seems fine from the BIOS menu. Anybody have an idea on what is the cause? It was Ok for few days, and then this problem started. I got around it by renaming hwclock and put an empty file there.
Hmm, sounds almost like a kernel+hardware problem (since I believe /dev/rtc is used for clock access...). Not sure how to investigate yet, though.
I have a similar A7V-based system which exhibits this problem too (using a stock 7.2 install, and also using the errata kernel). The hwclock invocation in init.d/halt also hangs. A workaround for both problems is to add CLOCKFLAGS="--directisa" to /etc/sysconfig/hwclock once you've managed to boot. According to http://freshmeat.net/releases/41231/, there is a version of hwclock which also works around this problem: "This release avoids the hang (usually a boot time hang) on machines with broken rtc drivers by timing out after 2 seconds waiting for the clock interrupt, then falling back to a non-interrupt clock access method."
Additional info is that I never had any problems running hwclock (without --directisa) using a 2.2 kernel on the same machine.
(Oops, that flag needs to be added to /etc/sysconfig/clock for the workaround)
I'll suggest to the util-linux maintainer to incorporate the forked hwclock - otherwise, I'm not going to touch hwclock for fear of blowing up on a lot of other systems (e.g. architectures that don't know what an ISA bus is :). The workaround is to boot with init=/bin/sh the first time and hack up /etc/sysconfig/hwclock.
*** Bug 55683 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 62094 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This appears to be fixed in 8.0.
Or maybe it's not fixed. I enabled automatic power-on (at a given time) in my BIOS, and now hwclock hangs again (repeatably) without the --directisa flag. I'll try disabling automatic power-on and see if I can boot without passing --directisa to hwclock.