Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 13:24:17 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Year 2k and PC hardware Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.981202131947.29359I-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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Having recently visited the web pages of a number of the hardware vendors of machines I run FreeBSD on, I am a little concerned about some of the older machines. For example, Gateway 2000 refers to BIOS fixes for >= pentium machines that fix the bios access functions for the real time clock. However, they note that the fix does not apply if the OS attempts to access the RTC directly (I'm not sure what this means -- I don't know how the RTC is implemented on PC machines). Similarly, Dell suggested the download of a BIOS upgrade for machines that were 486-class. Needless to say, it appears that no one was particularly interested in how 386-class machines fared. While FreeBSD itself may behave correctly for year 2k problems (presumably the large majority of dates are manipulated and stored as seconds since epoch), it's not clear that it will behave happily on all hardware. I was wondering if anyone had done any testing with FreeBSD on various hardware platforms to see if it did the right thing? We certainly use both newer and older machines with FreeBSD, and incorrect behavior would be most unfortunate. :) With older machines, we don't have duplicates of the machines in all cases, so testing them may be difficult. It might also just be time to retire our 386 machines, but they are very convenient to have around. (I was also unhappy to see that my bank is not very Y2k-ready just yet :( ) Robert N Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: 03 01 DD 8E 15 67 48 73 25 6D 10 FC EC 68 C1 1C Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cmu.edu/ TIS Labs at Network Associates, Inc. http://www.tis.com/ SafePort Network Services http://www.safeport.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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