I had problems trying to get an ST RTC chip to be recognized by Linux. The chip was attached to the I2C bus 0 at address 0x68, the chip is supported by Linux but the two did not talk.
This is a custom board made specially for my US employer. The vendor brought up U-Boot, tested the peripherals with it and that was about it. I tried the denx.de kernel in a Sequoia configuration and no luck, I haggled the board vendor and they gave me a Linux kernel that booted on the board but did not detect much of the hardware.
By playing with the kernel config I got it to sniff the NOR flash and to partition it using a command-line scheme but the RTC chip was a mistery.
I dug a bit in the kernel source and docs and learned that the kernel expects from the bootloader a flattned device tree yet U-Boot does not provide that. The vendor provided a DTS file that has a textual representation of the devices but it did not get the RTC right.
By poking around I learned that the PPC kernel is matching text labels ("compatible") provided by the device drivers against the labels in the device tree. I hacked those a bit and the RTC works fine now.
-ulianov
