Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Can we convert UTC time to local time in Qemu

[Gonglei <arei.gonglei@huawei.com>]

On 2015/5/20 17:00, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 06:29:55AM +0000, Gonglei (Arei) wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> At present, Qemu use g_time_val_to_iso8601() to get the UTC added to error_report()
>> (commit 5e2ac5191), TBH this way is very simply, we just need invoke standard glib functions to
>> complete the job. 
>>
>> But in the cloud computing and data center scenarios, there are many
>> Other open source components, such as kernel, libvirt, openstack which are all using local time
>> to record the message logs, only Qemu is using the UTC time. When we want to find a error
>> message of Qemu, we should convert the UTC time to local time manually, and unfortunately
>> different countries have different local time, what a trouble thing the converting is.
>>
>> So, my question is: Can we convert the UTC time to local time in Qemu?
>>
>> Any thoughts? Thanks.
> 
> Actually, libvirt uses UTC for logging almost exclusively for quite a
> while, because AFAIK, there is no async signal safe way to convert to
> localtime in POSIX / glibc
> 
Thanks for correcting me :)

Regards,
-Gonglei

> commit 3ec128989606278635a7c5dfbeee959692d12e15
> Author: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
> Date:   Tue Nov 29 12:11:01 2011 +0000
> 
>     Add internal APIs for dealing with time
>     
>     The logging APIs need to be able to generate formatted timestamps
>     using only async signal safe functions. This rules out using
>     gmtime/localtime/malloc/gettimeday(!) and much more.
>     
>     Introduce a new internal API which is async signal safe.
>     
>       virTimeMillisNowRaw replacement for gettimeofday. Uses clock_gettime
>                           where available, otherwise falls back to the unsafe
>                           gettimeofday
>     
>       virTimeFieldsNowRaw  replacements for gmtime(), convert a timestamp
>       virTimeFieldsThenRaw into a broken out set of fields. No localtime()
>                            replacement is provided, because converting to
>                            local time is not practical with only async signal
>                            safe APIs.
>     
>       virTimeStringNowRaw  replacements for strftime() which print a timestamp
>       virTimeStringThenRaw into a string, using a pre-determined format, with
>                            a fixed size buffer (VIR_TIME_STRING_BUFLEN)
>     
>     For each of these there is also a version without the Raw postfix
>     which raises a full libvirt error. These versions are not async
>     signal safe
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
>