On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 12:00:30AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
Yes, but there are still quite some issues to solve there:
1) How do you tell the system that it should apply the offset in the first place, i.e at boot time before NTP or any other mechanism can correct it? 2) Deal with creative vendors who have their own idea about the 'start of the epoch'3) Add the information of wraparound time to the rtc device which needs to be filled in for each device. That way the rtc_*** accessor functions can deal with them whether they wrap in 2038 or 2100 or whatever.
#3 is the simplest problem of them :)
Well, if there's additional non-volatile storage, you can store additional information in there, but you still need the RTC subsystem to be aware that the hardware is only 32-bit capable.
You'd also still need something along the lines I detailed (redefining what dates the past 32-bit values indicate) to cope with the RTC being set backwards after the machine thinks (possibly incorrectly) that the date has jumped forwards.