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RTC

Introduction

AIBOX-Orin NX has an external RTC powered by a capacitor on the external motherboard, which ensures the RTC continues to run for a short period after power loss. In the kernel, it is represented as rtc0.

Interface Usage

Linux provides three user-space interfaces for interacting with the RTC. The paths are:

  • SYSFS interface: /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/
  • PROCFS interface: /proc/driver/rtc
  • IOCTL interface: /dev/rtc0

Synchronize the current system time to the RTC.

hwclock -w

SYSFS interface

You can directly use cat and echo to operate the interfaces under /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/.

For example, to view the current RTC date and time:

# cat /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/date
2024-07-10
# cat /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/time
02:36:30

PROCFS interface

To print RTC-related information:

# cat /proc/driver/rtc
rtc_time : 02:37:00
rtc_date : 2024-07-10
alrm_time : 00:00:00
alrm_date : 1970-01-01
alarm_IRQ : no
alrm_pending : no
update IRQ enabled : no
periodic IRQ enabled : no
periodic IRQ frequency : 1
max user IRQ frequency : 64
24hr : yes

IOCTL interface

You can use ioctl to control /dev/rtc0

For detailed usage instructions, please refer to document kernel-jammy-src/Documentation/admin-guide/rtc.rst