Hi Colin, On Tue, 28 Sept 2021 at 21:39, Colin King <colin.king@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >Shifting the u16 value returned by readw by 16 bits to the left >will be promoted to a 32 bit signed int and then sign-extended >to an unsigned long. If the top bit of the readw is set then >the shifted value will be sign extended and the top 32 bits of >the result will be set. Ah,.. C is fun in all the wrong places. :) These chips are full of 32bit registers that are split into two 16 registers 4 bytes apart when seen from the ARM CPU so we probably have this same mistake in a few other places. A similar pattern is used a bit later on in the same file to read the counter: seconds = readw(priv->rtc_base + REG_RTC_CNT_VAL_L) | (readw(priv->rtc_base + REG_RTC_CNT_VAL_H) << 16); I guess it works at the moment because the top bit won't be set until 2038. Thanks, Daniel