Conversation

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f076ef44a44d02ed91543f820c14c2c7dff53716
I think about this ever so often, and I wonder, how did they fuck this up so hard?
How? The company shouldn't even exist after such a fuck-up.

3
9
1

@lynne I've seen many broken RTCs over the years but this is still my favourite.

0
0
0

@lynne I oftentimes think October has no business having 31 days and November only 30 (December is a blur, cause holidays fuck up any perception of time I managed to scrape up)... but I don't go into the business of implementing calendars, probably to great benefit for humanity.

0
0
0
@lynne To be fair, time keeping is regressing globally. We used to have good local oscilators, now we have ntp.

And yes, I have smartwatch which is 'not great' at time keeping.
1
0
0
In general, I do not understand the legacy to keep time in RTC in minutes, hours, days, months and years. Every sane system wants to run in monotonic binary time in its kernel, same for time comparison and adjustments. So ideal chip would provide some ROM field to specify its timebase frequency and then provide single binary number long enough to rollover in some reasonable time, decades, centuries. Some field to store base and some service information would worth to be added. I understand that division by 60 has been heavy deal for some 8-bit chips and even PC BIOS programmers has problems to understand how to convert monotonic time to Gregorian calendar, then the nightmare has been conservation by graphic library called Windows. This library has been replaced by real OS model obtained with DEC employee acquisition, but it keeps by default RTC in local time, adjusts its time during daylight saving period. What should do Windows laptop, when you move between time-zones??? And again there is already option in registry to keep RTC in UTC... But keeping it in some epoch based seconds or milliseconds would be much easier for everybody. All these conversion done during virtualization, RTC loads, stores....
1
0
0
@ppisa Single binary counter does not really work well with leap seconds. Time is complex :-(.
1
0
0
@pavel If you have somewhere defined what is the base regardless of the leap seconds then you can use leap seconds history or cumulative count. For simple BIOS like tools you can define that adjustment offset is stored in some
backed up RTC RAM register.
0
0
0