From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3F3D4B2B.9000700@laurelnetworks.com> Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 17:05:47 -0400 From: "Michael J. Accetta" MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Stephen Williams <612dlag102@sneakemail.com> Cc: linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org Subject: Re: Hardware Requrements for Linux on 405GPr References: <21518-79162@sneakemail.com> <3F3BEE49.4050806@mvista.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Sender: owner-linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: Mark Hatle wrote: > An RTC is not required for Linux. Many designs I have seen do not have > one. However, an RTC is an excellent device to have available! Various > applications and services may require a consistant, ever increasing > time. NFS is the one that comes to mind immediatly. If the device is > rebooted and the time goes back to default, NFS may have problems. You can defintely run into problems with NFS and no RTC. We have a setup like this and without a RTC, NFS would end up allocating (I think) request id's based on the time that might be cached on the server to handle replay. With the time always starting at 0, different requests with the same id could be issued from the card across boot sessions and the server would have cached the old request, producing some confusing results when it replied to the cached rather than new request. Our solution was to add a TIME protocol probe in the ipv4 BOOTP path so the card always got the right time before continuing the boot. Mike Accetta ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/