efirtc.txt
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- EFI Real Time Clock driver
- -------------------------------
- S. Eranian <eranian@hpl.hp.com>
- March 2000
- I/ Introduction
- This document describes the efirtc.c driver has provided for
- the IA-64 platform.
- The purpose of this driver is to supply an API for kernel and user applications
- to get access to the Time Service offered by EFI version 0.92.
- EFI provides 4 calls one can make once the OS is booted: GetTime(),
- SetTime(), GetWakeupTime(), SetWakeupTime() which are all supported by this driver.
- We describe those calls as well the design of the driver in the following
- sections.
- II/ Design Decisions
- The original ideas was to provide a very simple driver to get access to,
- at first, the time of day service. This is required in order to access, in a
- portable way, the CMOS clock. A program like /sbin/hwclock uses such a clock
- to initialize the system view of the time during boot.
- Because we wanted to minimize the impact on existing user-level apps using
- the CMOS clock, we decided to expose an API that was very similar to the one
- used today with the legacy RTC driver (driver/char/rtc.c). However, because
- EFI provides a simpler services, not all all ioctl() are available. Also
- new ioctl()s have been introduced for things that EFI provides but not the
- legacy.
- EFI uses a slightly different way of representing the time, noticeably
- the reference date is different. Year is the using the full 4-digit format.
- The Epoch is January 1st 1998. For backward compatibility reasons we don't
- expose this new way of representing time. Instead we use something very
- similar to the struct tm, i.e. struct rtc_time, as used by hwclock.
- One of the reasons for doing it this way is to allow for EFI to still evolve
- without necessarily impacting any of the user applications. The decoupling
- enables flexibility and permits writing wrapper code is ncase things change.
- The driver exposes two interfaces, one via the device file and a set of ioctl()s.
- The other is read-only via the /proc filesystem.
- As of today we don't offer a /proc/sys interface.
- To allow for a uniform interface between the legacy RTC and EFI time service,
- we have created the include/linux/rtc.h header file to contain only the
- "public" API of the two drivers. The specifics of the legacy RTC are still
- in include/linux/mc146818rtc.h.
-
- III/ Time of day service
- The part of the driver gives access to the time of day service of EFI.
- Two ioctl()s, compatible with the legacy RTC calls:
- Read the CMOS clock: ioctl(d, RTC_RD_TIME, &rtc);
- Write the CMOS clock: ioctl(d, RTC_SET_TIME, &rtc);
- The rtc is a pointer to a data structure defined in rtc.h which is close
- to a struct tm:
- struct rtc_time {
- int tm_sec;
- int tm_min;
- int tm_hour;
- int tm_mday;
- int tm_mon;
- int tm_year;
- int tm_wday;
- int tm_yday;
- int tm_isdst;
- };
- The driver takes care of converting back an forth between the EFI time and
- this format.
- Those two ioctl()s can be exercised with the hwclock command:
- For reading:
- # /sbin/hwclock --show
- Mon Mar 6 15:32:32 2000 -0.910248 seconds
- For setting:
- # /sbin/hwclock --systohc
- Root privileges are required to be able to set the time of day.
- IV/ Wakeup Alarm service
- EFI provides an API by which one can program when a machine should wakeup,
- i.e. reboot. This is very different from the alarm provided by the legacy
- RTC which is some kind of interval timer alarm. For this reason we don't use
- the same ioctl()s to get access to the service. Instead we have
- introduced 2 news ioctl()s to the interface of an RTC.
- We have added 2 new ioctl()s that are specific to the EFI driver:
- Read the current state of the alarm
- ioctl(d, RTC_WKLAM_RD, &wkt)
- Set the alarm or change its status
- ioctl(d, RTC_WKALM_SET, &wkt)
- The wkt structure encapsulates a struct rtc_time + 2 extra fields to get
- status information:
-
- struct rtc_wkalrm {
- unsigned char enabled; /* =1 if alarm is enabled */
- unsigned char pending; /* =1 if alarm is pending */
- struct rtc_time time;
- }
- As of today, none of the existing user-level apps supports this feature.
- However writing such a program should be hard by simply using those two
- ioctl().
- Root privileges are required to be able to set the alarm.
- V/ References.
- Checkout the following Web site for more information on EFI:
- http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/