VanLUG Email Archive
Andrew Daviel (andrew@andrew.triumf.ca)
Fri, 15 Jan 1999 17:45:43 -0800 (PST)
Although 32-bit Linux won't bomb till 2038, I presume that Linux systems
can still be affected by problems in the RTC, I think, so your time at
boot may come up wrong with an old RTC until you've set the time with ntp
or whatever.
Does anyone know whether Linux can be affected by Crouch-Echlin effect ?
Just looking at
/usr/src/linux-2.0.30/drivers/char/rtc.c, etc. I see that the
Motorola MC146818 RTC uses a 2-digit year, although the spec sheet says
it has a 100-year calendar (which 100 years??). If the year digits are
less than 70, rtc.c adds 100, then later adds 1900 to it. So it gets the
right year. But, hang on a minute ... if it's using a real calendar, it's
going to say January 1 2000 is a Monday when it should be a Saturday. One
can look at /dev/rtc to see what it's set to (also whether your battery's
dead)
However, I guess when setting the system clock the day of week is ignored,
but perhaps it will get the leap year wrong for 2000.
Does anyone actually KNOW any of these things ?
Is Linux RTC affected by the BIOS at boot ?
Do third-party double-buffered compliant RTC cards (Centurion) work with
Linux ?
Andrew Daviel
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri 15 Jan 1999 - 17:46:16 PST