The current version of 'hwclock' when supplied with -A flag (or equivalently --arc) returns on UX, a.k.a. Ruffian, shfited back by 20 years. As startup files in 6.1 do that regardless of settings in /etc/sysconfig/clock, which likely should be classified as a bug on its own, then 6.1 installation on UX ends up with a funny time. To add to an aggravation the maintainer of util-linux insists that this a correct behaviour. Technically he is right as a hardware clock on UX indeed is somewhat unusual but this behaviour violates a long established practice and a "principle of the least surprise"; users are NOT expected to memorize minutae of a hardware clock implementation on particular boards. An alternate implemenation of a function from clock/cmos.c, which restores sanity, is included in an attached file. It is not totally full-proof as it may fail if /proc is not mounted, but then startup scripts will have other problems to worry about. Michal Jaegermann michal
Sorry to bother again, but could you reply to this message with the clock/cmos.c attached, as the file is not attached? A pointer to a src rpm with your changes to util-linux is probably even a better idea. Thanks.
This old report got, in a sense, obsoleted by further developments. The current 'hwclock', from util-linux, is quite good at guessing clock types on a hardware in question and there is in reality more than two of these. :-( At least I do not know platforms where this guessing fails so the best policy is _not_ to set -A, or -S, flag in startup scripts unless explicitely requested in /etc/sysconfig/clock. A default in this configuration file should be "none". In any case it is totally unacceptable overriding this choice in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit because a boot via milo was detected. The later is a root cause of troubles on UX as it boots with milo and its clock does not conform to ARC specifications. I do not have this UX anymore but when I had it following the policy outlined above was what was needed. The only problems were showing during updates when Red Hat tools were trying to "outsmart" me (see #17877). Also for quite a while Hard Data ships all its Alpha machines with a preloaded software (i.e. nearly all of these) configured according to this policy and I still have to hear complaints because of that. :-) It was not possible to do that in the past when clock utilities were not smart enough.