System time and ToD clock?

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

Not having seen any documentation about this (and I'd not yet gotten to
UTSL), I was a bit surprised when gNewSense reported that my Yeeloong's
ToD clock was set to 1992, making the filesystems have dates in the
future.

Dropping into PMON at the next boot confirmed that the day/month/time
was correct, but was 20 years in the past.  I set it back to the current
year.

When I booted NetBSD again, it declared "Preposterous time in ToD clock"
and initialized system time from the filesystem timestamps.  Shortly
therafter 'ntpd' was started to keep time sane (thanks to now-working
ioctls).

When, after a panic (freeing free inode on an ext2fs filesystem), I
again booted gNewSense to clean up.  Once again it reported a year of
1992.  Returning to NetBSD once more elicited no warnings.

This is reminiscent of the mvme68k port where system ToD clock holds
only a 2-digit year taken as an offset from the epoch (1968 in the
case of NetBSD/mvme68k).

Is this also the case for the evbmips port?  While this might be fine
for hardware unlikely to share local filesystems with other OSes, it
makes multi-booting Lemote systems troublesome.

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