itsnotabigtruck over at the Zuneboards forums has explained what the problem is/was. Its really not that big of a deal and understandable that it was missed (the original Zune hardware was outsourced).
After doing some poking around in the source code for the Zune’s clock driver (available free from the Freescale website), I found the root cause of the now-infamous Zune 30 leapyear issue that struck everyone on New Year’s Eve.
The Zune’s real-time clock stores the time in terms of days and seconds since January 1st, 1980. When the Zune’s clock is accessed, the driver turns the number of days into years/months/days and the number of seconds into hours/minutes/seconds. Likewise, when the clock is set, the driver does the opposite.
The Zune frontend first accesses the clock toward the end of the boot sequence. Doing this triggers the code that reads the clock and converts it to a date and time. Below is the part of this code that determines the year component of the date:
Code:year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */ while (days > 365) { if (IsLeapYear(year)) { if (days > 366) { days -= 366; year += 1; } } else { days -= 365; year += 1; } }
I’m not a programmer, but I understand that all electronic devices do some kind of math to figure out what the date is. In fact Blackberry had to release a patch at the beginning of last year to account for a similar error. Although its unfortunate it is entirely understandable that this kind of thing could be overlooked. I guess its better than exploding batteries.
Tags: Zune, ZUNEPOCALYPSE
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