[Bug 1201978] dracut assumes BIOS time is UTC closed without fixing again

[Andre Robatino]

Felix Miata <mrmazda <at> earthlink.net> writes:

> > Just as a workaround, you CAN make a Windows box use UTC for the RTC...
> 
> Multiboot is not a universe limited to Windows and Linux, and certainly not
> only the latest version of either. And, there's a whole LAN to consider, not
> one PC in isolation.

AFAIK, Windows is the only OS that has trouble using UTC for the RTC.

> When I acquire a new PC or motherboard, I set its clock to match the rest of
> the clocks in the building, neighborhood and city, so the sun is overhead
> somewhere around noon. That's how time is supposed to be. It's up to a PC to
> adjust to me and my environment, not vice versa, and when I boot a floppy I
> don't need to look at a watch, TV or wall clock to see what time it really is.

If you're using a laptop and travel between time zones, there is no
permanent local time. And even if you stay in one place, if your local time
is subject to Daylight Saving, the fact that it can go backwards when
changing from DT to ST causes problems for the OS. See
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html . To avoid that, the time
used by the RTC should increase monotonically. Also, when people share
files, if their RTCs are in different time zones, it's impossible to know
exactly how to interpret a file's timestamps, since they depend on the
originating PC's time zone. The only way to avoid these problems is for
everyone to have their RTC set on the same monotonically increasing time,
and UTC is the natural choice.