> The only viable long-term solution seems to me to be to use the clock
> chip as a time-of-year clock, holding the time in seconds since Jan 1
> in the current year.

>From my experience with the Alpha, DEC UNIX does this as well.  From
your experiences with pmax, i guess the ULTRIX did too.


> (I don't suppose the Alpha port does this already anywhere??

No, i don't do it in the Alpha port.

I got really frustrated at the beginning of 1995, when i was still
occasionally booting back and forth between OSF/1 and NetBSD/Alpha,
trying to figure out what the clock base was... so i didn't bother
figuring it out, and since i've converted my NetBSD/Alpha boxes to run
NetBSD/Alpha full-time, i've had no problems.

As far as i'm aware, the Alpha firmware doesn't do any bounds-checking
like that on the clock, so it's not a problem.


chris