Re: [Qemu-devel] Changing RTC from UTC to local time

[Kyle Hayes <kyle@silverbeach.net>]

On Saturday 29 May 2004 07:39, Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have recently been experimenting with QEMU a bit and I noticed
> that the simulated RTC will always give the time in UTC, not in the
> local time zone of the host. This is probably by design; however, I
> would like to question that design choice.
>
> On a PC, the RTC is supposed to always be set to local time, not to
> UTC. It might be different on different architectures - but for a
> simulated PC, the current behavior is not correct.

Er, no.  For a _Windows_ PC, this is true.  For all *BSD and Linux 
OSes, you should usually use UTC/GMT for the hardware clock.

> This is an important issue because Windows assumes that the RTC
> behaves to the spec and thinks that the time reported by the RTC is
> local. Thus, a Windows installed inside QEMU will report the
> current UTC time as the local time. If the host computer is located
> in any time zone other than GMT, the time on the host and the time
> on the slave will therefore be off by hours.
>
> The fix for this is obvious - set the RTC to the local time of the
> host, not to UTC. I have attached a trivial patch to accomplish
> this.

Please revert the patch or make it so that it is a runtime option.  I 
don't run Windows in QEMU and this makes all my times off.

Best,
Kyle