Re: updating of CMOS clock

["Salman Ahmed" <ssahmed@pathcom.com>]

>>>>> "LP" == Laurent PICOULEAU <lcrpic@a2points.com> writes:
    LP> For your BIOS : simply set your CMOS clock to the GMT time :

I am being a bit daft but do you mean that I should go into my BIOS and
change the time to whatever the equivalent GMT time is ? There doesn't
seem to be any option in the BIOS that explicitly sets/specifies GMT
time. The only option in my system's BIOS related to time is :

 Standard CMOS Setup -> {Date, Time}

    LP> it's that simple. For debian : are you using slink or potato ?
    LP> BTW, did you choosed the right options during your kernel
    LP> compilation ? You should post here the CONFIG_APM* of your
    LP> /usr/src/linux/.config
    LP> 

I am using a system with a lot of packages from potato (namely
glibc-2.1) but there are still a few slink packages still installed on
my system.

Here are the APM options from my kernel's .config file:

@phoenix:[/usr/tmp/linux] grep APM .config
CONFIG_APM=y
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND is not set
CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
# CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE is not set
# CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK is not set
CONFIG_APM_POWER_OFF=y
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_MULTIPLE_SUSPEND is not set
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_SUSPEND_BOUNCE is not set
# CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT is not set
# CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS is not set

    LP>  Updating CMOS on reboot/shutdown does improve the efficiency of
    LP> xntp/ntpdate...
    LP> 

But for some reason it causes a lot of time drift on my system. After a
couple of weeks or so I end up losing > 3 hours or so. This never
happened to me when I was using RH-5.2 with a 2.2 kernel (with APM
compiled in).

    LP> for a (pure) slink system you set this (usage of GMT or local
    LP> time) in /etc/default/rcS

Here is the relevant setting from my /etc/default/rcS:

# Set GMT="-u" if your system clock is set to GMT, and GMT="" if not.
GMT=""

Thanks.

-- 
Salman Ahmed
ssahmed AT pathcom DOT com