Re: [PATCH] UTC timestamp option for FAT filesystems

Andi Kleen
2008-06-25T22:34:29Z

Joe Peterson <joe@skyrush.com> writes:

> Attached is a patch to provide a new mount option ("utc") for DOS
> (vfat/msdos) filesystems, allowing timestamps to be in universal
> coordinated time (UTC) rather than local time in applications where
> doing this is advantageous.

The time zone handling seems racy. e.g. consider the case DST
changes on that day. You convert before the switch over
and suddenly the time offset is different.

I'm actually not sure someone in user space is even updating the kernel
idea of the timezone for DST on a switch (generally it was assumed it's some
obsolete BSD concept and that all real programs only use the
user space glibc implementation that knows all the rules). So
DST might not be supported at all.

Also even if it worked it seems very limited. If you do that why not
have an option to set an arbitary time zone offset?

-Andi