debian install fails to add fixrtc to systems that do not have a battery backed RTC (arm)

[Tobin Davis]

Most arm development systems (beagle, panda, etc) do not have a battery backed RTC. The RTC gets set by looking at the timestamp of the rootfs partition, but only if "fixrtc" is added to the kernel cmdline. Without this addition, the system may hang while doing a filesystem check due to timestamps being in the future.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

We have always tried to avoid trying to detect hardware and add kernel parameters based on the results; it is problematic for a variety of reasons. Can't the kernel notice that it has no RTC devices and behave as if 'fixrtc' were set? It seems that the kernel should be in the best position to make this kind of decision.

[mahmoh (mahmoh)]

For the net install case, fixrtc would not work since there may not be a disk to use with previous mount information so this part of the problem should also be addressed, or is this a separate bug?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Well, I mean, that just underlines why it would be bad to hardcode this in the installer.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for debian-installer (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]