FAQ RTC Sync Feature on Advantech ATCA Blades

Purpose

This article is introducing RTC sync mechanism on Advantech ATCA products. For those users require special use cases, there're options for synchronizing system (blade) time

Target Audience

To users using Advantech ATCA MIC-5332/MIC-5345 Series CPU boards.

Use Cases

To avoid system time differences, a synchronization mechanism among all sources that are available in an ATCA environment is needed.

The BIOS sends a “SET SEL TIME” command to synchronize RTC time to IPMC during every BIOS booting. Format conversion between IPMI time format and BIOS format will be handled in the BIOS.

In BIOS setup menu, user can modify the RTC time in the main page. Before exit BIOS setup menu, BIOS will synchronize RTC time to IPMC via “SET SEL TIME”.

The RTC synchronization mechanism available on the Advantech ATCA blades have some configuration settings and modes that are described in detail in following tables

DO consider this RTC setting for those systems WITHOUTShelf Manager (SHMM) or user wants to treat this ATCA blade as standard x86 platforms, or system time would be reset to default on every boot.

For more detail please refer to attached file