From: "Frank Haber" 

(Sent to m.'s email in error)

It seems all the Debian forks based on Linus' 2.6 kernel have been flailing
around with this since early ***20005***.  Very strange.  Since it's hard
to find what's below, I'm quoting it, for what it's worth.  And most
puzzling is the lack of hard hangs and corrupt CMOS on anything but Dells.

================
[8] What Intel has to say.

    Found by Googling for "8208CA", and then reading Google's
    "cached" copy.  (This stuff isn't easy to find - the original
    has evidently been taken down:

    sunsite.rediris.es/sites/download.intel.nl/
design/chipsets/specupdt/290739.htm
                    ^^ Estonia??)

    This document may or may not explain 2.8.1 real-time clock
    problem.  But for those of you with a hardware manufacturing
    background, can you IMAGINE shipping a piece of equipment with
    design flaws such as these and  requiring BIOS manufacturers
    to develop and test band-aids for them?  And then requiring OS
    developers to do the same work over again?

    Software timers in BIOS?  In the KERNEL??  Arrrgh.

    A chip with an arbitration deadlock which can lock up a bus,
    which they're not going to fix?

    And this stuff is used in ... avionics!  (At least by one
    manufacturer.  Not certified for the airlines, fortunately.)

    Quotes from Intel's document follow.

   "Problem:
    Under certain conditions, a CPU generated I/O read to RTC
    (Real Time Clock) registers 0-9 may return an incorrect
    value. The issue occurs on the read path from the RTC
    registers and the RTC value in the registers is not impacted.
    Should the certain conditions occur, one or more of the bits
    read from the RTC registers may be incorrect. The issue has
    only been found using a synthetic test and has not been seen
    using commercially available software.  [ <= N.B. ]

   "Implication:
    An operating system or software applications which
    synchronizes the time/date value with the RTC http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss

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