On 28 January 2005 21:54, Ketil Malde wrote:

Ashley Yakeley writes:

...

It seems what should have been done was to create a patch to the kernel that allows the hardware clock to run on TAI but have gettimeofday return broken time as per POSIX, and have some other function to return TAI time. Perhaps someone's done this.

I tried to find out, with no success. Anybody? I'm about to reinstall my Linux laptop after a disk crash, so I could try to do this. It also appears that support is needed in NTP, although I'm not sure why.

I don't know about the NTP support, but at least with GNU libc you can use a system clock set to TAI:

TZ=Europe/London date Mon Jan 31 09:42:47 GMT 2005 TZ=right/Europe/London date Mon Jan 31 09:42:26 GMT 2005

when TZ is set to "right/..." glibc assumes the system clock is set to TAI seconds since the epoch. Of course, there's still no way for a user program to tell whether the system clock is supposed to be TAI or UTC. Cheers, Simon