Subject: Re: Timezones

From: "Eduardo E. Horvath [email-masked]" <[email-masked]>

On Fri, 30 Sep 1994 [email-masked] wrote:

> But that is the problem: Either you have on both sides the right time,
> but then you have NetBSD set up for a wrong timezone, or you have the
> wrong time on the ADos side, but the right time *and* timezone with NetBSD.
> 
> I haven't tried this yet, but maybe it is possible, to correct the time
> while booting (somewhere in rc.local), and resetting the time when
> shutting down (somewhere in fastboot, or whatever your favorite way to
> exit NetBSD is). AFAIK it is not (yet) possible to set the battery backuped
> clock from NetBSD, so the second step is probably not necessary.

I have spent some time looking into this.  It can be done, but it will be 
difficult to do.  Problem #1 is that the in-kernel timezone support is 
minimal, so doing reverse-timezone conversions from the RTclock are 
difficult, and IMHO don't belong in the kernel.  Secondly, if the 
time/date on a ufs partition is more recent than the RTC, the kernel 
assumes a bad RTC and uses the value from the ufs partition, and this 
value is set before /etc/rc is run.  This means that if you're in the 
western hemisphere, your clock creeps forward a few hours each time you 
reboot.  

The only reasonable solution I can see is to have a user-level program 
that directly getis its value from the RTC and resets the kernel time.  
Unfortunately, the RTC is not consistent between Amiga models...

UGH!

Eduardo