• Contact: tech-kern

Certain real time chips, and other related power hardware, have a facility within them to allow the kernel to set a specific time and date at which time the machine will power itself on. One such chip is the DS1685 RTC. A kernel API should be developed to allow such devices to have a power-on-time set from userland. Additionally, the API should be made available through a userland program, or added to an existing utility, such as halt(8).

It may also be useful to make this a more generic interface, to allow for configuring other devices, such as Wake-On-Lan ethernet chips, to turn them on/off, set them up, etc.