Re: Year 2000
Arran,
Although linux may be "year 2000 safe," You also must assure that all
application programs are also clean. It much more likely that an
application program will will have the "fatal" hidden flaw that will bring
you down.
Ben
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Benjamin T. White, M.D. | bewhite@bgsm.edu
Dept of Neurosurgery | http://members.aol.com/benmd/home.html
Bowman Gray SOM |
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On Sun, 2 Nov 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:
> There is a year-2000 problem we know of that is connected to your PC's
> BIOS and clock chip. The BIOS and clock chip of many systems store a
> two-digit year. This is a separate issue from the Linux kernel clock,
> which is all software. Linux uses a program to read the hardware clock
> into the software one at boot time, and then does not refer to the
> hardware clock again except to set it or to measure its drift over time
> and correct for that. A patch to the hardware clock reader is necessary
> to achieve year-2000 compliance even if your BIOS and clock chip think
> it's 1900. We expect to be distributing this with Debian 2.0 . Since we
> publish all source code, anyone can fix it sooner if necessary.
>
> Unix and Linux store time as a count of seconds since New Year's day
> 1970 in a signed 32-bit integer. This was chosen to make the system
> time-zone-independent. This form of time storage does not have a
> year-2000 problem, but it will overflow in the year 2036. By that time
> we expect to have converted to a 64-bit variable, which will not
> overflow for around 274877906944 years. Hopefully, by that time
> something better than Unix will have come along.
>
> Several other year-2000 issues have already been found and repaired.
> We've run our systems with the clock set to various future dates to test
> them. We can't guarantee there are not any problems left, but we are sure
> they would be minor ones, and rapidly repaired. Because we publish all
> source code, you are guaranteed that you can get any problems fixed quickly.
>
> Thanks
>
> Bruce Perens
> --
> Can you get your operating system fixed when you need it?
> Linux - the supportable operating system. http://www.debian.org/support.html
> Bruce Perens K6BP bruce@debian.org NEW PHONE NUMBER: 510-620-3502
>
>
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