[BusyBox] Serious bug in udhcpc
Wolfgang Denk
wd at denx.de
Tue Apr 22 07:19:45 UTC 2003
In message <1050985092.1476.13.camel at russ.local> you wrote:
>
> wait, so the kernel actually boots, looks at the uninitialized hardware,
> thinks for a moment, sticks its arm into the /dev/urandom bag, pulls out
> a winner, and sticks it into seconds since epoch? On all the embedded
> systems I've seen without a battery backed RTC, the clock is set to
> epoch on boot. That would be really broken behavior to never initialize
> the RTC, or to initialize it to a random value.
You haven't seen many embedded systems, then.
Uninitialized time is pretty usual on such systems. In quite a lot of
applications the actual date / time does not play a role and so
nobody bothers about it.
There are even embedded systems _with_ a RTC which come up with an
uninitialized value. For example, the MPC8xx family of PowerPC
processors has an internal RTC, which can be supplied from a battery
nbackup, but so only a _very_ small percentage of systems actually
provides a battery. On such systems, after poweron there is a random
value in the RTC register.
This is normal, nothing wrong here.
If there is something broken here than it is the software that
depends on being started after a certain date. Remember that all
values of a time_t are legal values; times < 1970 are perfectly
legal, too.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
--
Software Engineering: Embedded and Realtime Systems, Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87 Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88 Email: wd at denx.de
I have been over into the future, and it works.
- Lincoln Steffens in _Letters_ (1938) vol. 1, p. 463
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