From: Paul Jakma (paul at domain clubi.ie)
Date: Sun 02 May 1999 - 18:17:07 IST
On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Paul Curtayne wrote:
Do I understand this correctly?
1. UNIX/Linux bypasses the BIOS completely and accesses the RTC
directly
afaik, yes. but the RTC is only used to set the system time at boot.
from then on linux maintains it's own time seperate from the RTC.
2. Windows mostly goes throught the BIOS (aside: what Doze progs
access the RTC directly??)
3. The RTC in most pc's uses 2 digits for years and hence is not y2k
compliant
all pc RTC's use 2 digits for the year. century is indicated by a
seperate epoch counter.
4. Compliant BIOS's (ie most current ones) adjust for the RTC and pass
the time to the OS at boot and later
5. If the OS is Linux, the time will be arseways after 2000
no. linux will actually work around non-y2k compliant RTC's. ie if
the RTC year says 81 and there is no epoch, or the epoch is 1900,
linux will be clever enough to know it's actually 2000. (replace 81
with whatever year RTC's start at. exact details escape me)
i imagine that freebsd is similarly clever.
6. Linux PC's are shagged even though linux itself is compliant
no. linux will run fine on non-y2k compliant pc's. a certain other os
won't, in fact it's not even compliant on compliant hardware.
so you can recycle non-y2k compliant machines next year by installing
linux on them.
Am I:
a. right, and Linux pc's are going to die and we should be panicking
b, wrong, if so where?
linux pc's are fine.
I'm perturbed.
worst thing that could happen is that we'll have to have our y2k eve
celebrations by candlelight.
Paul
regards,
-- Paul Jakma paul at domain clubi.ie http://hibernia.clubi.ie PGP5 key: http://www.clubi.ie/jakma/publickey.txt ------------------------------------------- Fortune: Nothing succeeds like excess. -- Oscar Wilde
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