Re: (tiny) patch review: return if RTC diag fails

Manuel Bouyer <[email protected]> writes:

> I'm not sure what you call "bad/odd RTC behavior". Here we're just
> reading a byte of the sram, its value can be anything from 0 to 0xff.
> This value is supposed to be written by the BIOS.
>
> I think, from our current definition of NVRAM_DIAG_BITS, that some bits
> are not supposed to be set to 1, but I'm not sure if our NVRAM_DIAG_BITS
> is up to date.
>
> Are you suggecting that we should find another way to detect if the
> mc146818 is present ? AFAIK it's the other way round: unless we know it's
> not present (because e.g. we're in an environnement known to not have
> it like some hypervisors or emulators) we have to assume it's present
> (because it's a mandatory part of the hardware).

I am suggesting that if the code is going to decide the RTC is bad
because of a timeout or a bad value, and not use it, then that shouldn't
have anything to do with 'are we a vm'. That's all.