rtc: rk808: Compensate for Rockchip calendar deviation on November 31st
In A.D. 1582 Pope Gregory XIII found that the existing Julian calendar
insufficiently represented reality, and changed the rules about
calculating leap years to account for this. Similarly, in A.D. 2013
Rockchip hardware engineers found that the new Gregorian calendar still
contained flaws, and that the month of November should be counted up to
31 days instead. Unfortunately it takes a long time for calendar changes
to gain widespread adoption, and just like more than 300 years went by
before the last Protestant nation implemented Greg's proposal, we will
have to wait a while until all religions and operating system kernels
acknowledge the inherent advantages of the Rockchip system. Until then
we need to translate dates read from (and written to) Rockchip hardware
back to the Gregorian format.
This patch works by defining Jan 1st, 2016 as the arbitrary anchor date
on which Rockchip and Gregorian calendars are in sync. From that we can
translate arbitrary later dates back and forth by counting the number
of November/December transitons since the anchor date to determine the
offset between the calendars. We choose this method (rather than trying
to regularly "correct" the date stored in hardware) since it's the only
way to ensure perfect time-keeping even if the system may be shut down
for an unknown number of years. The drawback is that other software
reading the same hardware (e.g. mainboard firmware) must use the same
translation convention (including the same anchor date) to be able to
read and write correct timestamps from/to the RTC.
Signed-off-by: Julius Werner <jwerner@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Douglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@free-electrons.com>
1 file changed