linux-kernel - [RFC+PATCH] RTC calibration

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Date:	Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:48:53 +0200
From:	Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@...pro.no>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: [RFC+PATCH] RTC calibration

The STMicroelectronics M41T11 is an RTC chip which is similar in most
ways to the Dallas/Maxim DS1307 or DS1337, except that it supports
software calibration:

http://www.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/6103.pdf

I want to use this calibration feature in an embedded device I'm
working on at TANDBERG Telecom AS.  The basic idea is that when the
device is connected to the network and an accurate reference clock is
available, a userland process will periodically measure the divergence
between the reference clock and the RTC, set the RTC to the correct
time and step the calibration register in the correct direction to
compensate for the observed drift.

The purpose of this is to reduce the extent to which the RTC will
drift when the device is switched off.  Obviously it won't be perfect,
as the temperature will be lower when the device is off than when it
is being calibrated, but the crystal's accuracy curve is reasonably
flat across the relevant temperature range.

Since there is no way to distinguish the M41T11 from its many cousins,
I've forked a new rtc-m41t11 driver from rtc-ds1307, stripped some
irrelevant code, cleaned up the rest, and added support for the
calibration register.

In order to access this from userland, I've added two ioctls,
(RTC_SPEED_UP and RTC_SPEED_DOWN) with corresponding functions in
drivers/rtc/interface.c (rtc_speed_up() and rtc_speed_down()) and
corresponding slots in rtc_class_ops (speed_up and speed_down).

These ioctls etc. take no parameters: speed_up will increase the speed
of the RTC by some unspecified small amount and slow_down will
decrease it by some unspecified small amount.  The application must
simply measure, tweak, wait, measure, tweak, wait etc. until the RTC
is within epsilon of the reference - where epsilon is some number that
takes into account the precision of the RTC and of the reference
clock, system call overhead, etc.  Since the RTC usually has a 1s
precision, epsilon is likely to be ±1s in practice.

My hope is that this interface is simple enough and general enough to
be usable by other RTC chips that may also support calibration, and
that both design and code are of sufficiently quality to make it into
the mainline at some point.

Patch follows my sig.  Comments of all kinds are welcome.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav
Senior Software Developer
Linpro AS - www.linpro.no

View attachment "rtc-m41t11.diff" of type "text/plain" (12634 bytes)