Bug#660039: rtc no longer available under linux 3.2.4-1

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>]

On 02/15/2012 06:00 PM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> Weird.  Reproducible?  Does Linus's "master" behave the same way?
> Can you bisect?

argh.  It looks like this is not the fault of the kernel, so i'm closing
this ticket.

I tried rolling back to 3.2.1-1 from snapshot.debian.net:

 linux-image-3.2.0-1-686-pae_3.2.1-1_i386.deb
 SHA1: fb5ca95149378def1b12d4c314af928ab4f8d180

and it turned out that this machine was having the same rtc problems
after reboot to this older kernel (and on 3.1.8-2, which i tried as
well).   So something must have happened to my hardware that randomly
coincided with my switching kernels :(

I tried removing power and batteries from the machine, and booting to
different kernels, and the rtc still failed.

On my sixth reboot, i went into the BIOS setup, manually changed the
time of the clock by a little bit, and chose "Exit and Save" (or
whatever its moral equivalent is).

That must have reset something in the hardware, because now (rebooting
into 3.2.4-1) the rtc is back to working as normal.

Apologies for the false alarm over what appears to be some kind of
flakey hardware hiccup.

	--dkg