From the keyboard of Peter Galbavy:
> 
> Watching the recent discussions on daylight saving time etc got me
> wondering again about the point of having the timezone hardwired
> into the kernel.
> 
> I can't see why. Is there a major problem with assuming the RTC in
> a machine is set to the local (default) time ?

Yes, if you are able to use multiple OS'es and one of those is MSDOS, then
you have to manually adjust the RTC when a change happenes from non-DST
to DST and back to get the correct time in MSDOS.

One of my PC's has an AMI BIOS, which contains a DST option but which does
not work (=does nothing). I have heared (correct me if i'm wrong!) that
this switch enables the RTC DST switching:

both AMI and Phoenix document a DST bit in the RTC RAM (byte 0x0b, bit 0)
labelled "Enable DST", unfortunately it's not usable for our purposes
because the Motorola MC146818A Data sheet says about this bit: ".....On the
last Sunday in April the time increments from 1:59:59 AM to 3:00:00 AM. On
the last Sunday in October when the time reaches 1:59:59 AM it changes
to 1:00:00 AM. ..." - they hardcoded the position when the time change has
to occur.

So the time in a RTC on a PC on which xxxBSD is NOT the only operating
system is either the local time or the local time DST-adjusted by a MSDOS
user :-)

If NetBSD is the only bootable OS on machine it might be ok to have the
RTC run at GMT (or the modern equivalent of it), but for other situations
i see no straightforward solution ...

just my 0.02 ECU,
hellmuth
-- 
Hellmuth Michaelis    HCS Hanseatischer Computerservice GmbH    Hamburg, Europe
   Use of devices that are not officially supported can cause data loss, system
   panics and device damage.          (HP-UX 9.0, scsi(7): SCSI device drivers)

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