udev and serial port + clock not holding the time [solved]

[weeroona]

I've been googling around and searching through the forums to no avail. Maybe I'm not looking for the right thing.

I have a fresh install of Gentoo on a new machine and I have two issues:
1) the date is not being stored after I reboot. It always goes back to Jan 10, 2005. Any thoughts? could it be that I need to get the current bios?

2) I'm trying to hook up a device to the serial port. On my old gentoo system, I had no problem using /dev/ttyS0. however I don't remember if I installed udev on that machine. I don't have access to it anymore. Currently, /dev/ttyS0 symlinks to tts/0 and 0 symlinks to ../ttyS0. It seems odd to me that it is recursive and doesn't go anywhere. I would expect that one of them be a 'character device' or whatever the 'c' stands for in the left column of ls -l.
I just installed udev and the system reboots properly but the serial port situation is still just as confusing. Should I have udev not tarball the /dev and let it create a new directory once then let it tarball it from then on?

My system:
Athlon 64 Sempron (running as x86)
Biostar Tforce 6100 <- a little sketchy but I needed a microATX and it got better reviews than what Asus had to offer.

Please let me know if you need any more info.
Thanks!
-Jeff

[Albert_g]

Hi

1) hwclock is your friend
try hwclock and check the time reported by the bios clock
if is ok -> goto 1a)
else, set it with hwclock --systohc
goto 1)
1a) try hwclock --hctosys
if the reported time with date is ok -> the bios and the system should be fine
else you have a bios problem

2) dmesg | less and check if the ttyS* ports are detected and what does the kernel with them
could be that you need to use mknod /dev/ttyS0 c 4 64 && mknod /dev/ttyS1 c 4 65

Albert

[JeliJami]

[weeroona]

clock was being initialized during boot.
The problem was hwclock not being set to system clock. 'hwclock --systohc' solved that issue.

and 'mknod /dev/ttyS0 c 4 64' fixed the serial port problem after I deleted the symlink.
Thanks so much for your help!