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Comment by 762236 | Hacker News Reader

The introduction to the patch is unnecessarily demeaning.

To be fair, with any amount of actual testing of the hardware IP before production, this would have been caught, it's a pretty bad bug.

Or Rockchip could have simply implemented a linear seconds counter, which would have worked fine and not required crazy workarounds.

I wonder how they missed it. If someone was asked to write verification tests for a RTC chip, this would one of the first few things obvious things to be checked.

I have a feeling they just "bought" the IP from a third-party and never actually tested it.

Really, or are you just saying that? They "missed it" because either (a) they didn't bother to test at all, or (b) they actually thought November has 31 days and didn't bother to do the 4 seconds of research required to get both the implementation and the test correct (since, of course, the people writing this are almost certainly Chinese and know as much about the Gregorian calendar as they know about McDonald's hamburgers, Norman Rockwell's art, or the present value of the euro).

Welcome to firmware, folks!

In addition to using the Gregorian calendar, China has a couple thousand McDonalds and people there are well aware of major world currencies.

They use the Gregorian calendar in China for everything except traditional holidays.

I make chips for a living, and if I had screwed up this badly I would fully expect to be fired. Being fired for incompetence is much more demeaning than gentle mockery by people writing a workaround.

That's hardly demeaning. I would be more devastated if I produced a product that had this type of a bug, versus what some random stranger might write in patch notes about it.

The person responsible doesn't care in the slightest. They got paid, their product not only got sold but is still being sold, and so there's nothing to be bothered with. That's what firmware's about: toss it out the door and move on. Trust me, if the person who did this even knows about it, he surely does not care at all.

The good news is that presumably the introduction of this bug means that they needlessly rewrote the RTC for this generation of chips, which means they might meaninglessly rewrite it again and the bug will be fixed!

Oh, you're such an optimist! Everyone knows firmware developers will only rewrite something needlessly if it's correct.

If I had to patch an OS kernel to account for an erroneous hardware RTC, I'd probably be inclined to be a little "demeaning" too.

I find it to be a remarkably gentle response to an act of such gross incompetence.

On the contrary, the comments are far too kind. This sort of error is simply unconscionable and the person responsible for it deserves far worse. It's unfortunate that the poor sod responsible for working around it can't do any more than write a scathing comment, because at an absolute minimum the responsible party should never work again (in any industry or role).

Wow, this comment is currently downvoted to 0, and the replies to it are justifying the belittling response. You become more worthy through action --- not by belittling someone else.

I think the downvotes are a little harsh, but I disagree with you. The patch notes are not belittling and don't represent any of the other problems I've seen complaints about re Linux contributions (swearing, bullying, sexism). They're just a bit of light-hearted fun - and they're not contained in the code itself.

> You become more worthy through action --- not by belittling someone else.

Hence why the patch submitter was upvoted and the commenter was downvoted.

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