doc/en/y2kbug.sgml
Tim Vanderhoek 9a2ab5f408 Spell "Greenamn" correctly.
Submitted by:	Dave Littell <davidl@efficient.com>
1998-02-12 04:52:30 +00:00

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2.8 KiB
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN" [
<!ENTITY date "$Date: 1998-02-12 04:52:30 $">
<!ENTITY title 'Year 2000 bug (aka "Millennium bug")'>
<!ENTITY % includes SYSTEM "includes.sgml"> %includes;
]>
<!-- $Id: y2kbug.sgml,v 1.2 1998-02-12 04:52:30 hoek Exp $ -->
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<p>As management understanding of the Year 2000 problem (aka, "The
Millennium Bug") increases, more and more companies are demanding
official statements from the vendors of their hardware and software
as to how their product will handle the year 2000 date rollover.</p>
<p>The current FreeBSD statement is as follows:</p>
<blockquote><big>"We believe, but cannot guarantee, that FreeBSD is Y2K
compliant. We have spent a significant amount of time verifying
this to be the case, but it is possible that something may have been
overlooked. If a Y2K bug is found in the future, we will attempt to
fix it as soon as possible."</big></blockquote>
<p align="right"><b>David Greenman, Principal Architect, The
FreeBSD project</b></p>
<h2>More information</h2>
<p><i>(This section based on the text from the <a
href="http://www.linux.org.uk/mbug.html">Linux Y2K compliance
page</a>)</i></p>
<p>As with all Unix and Unixlike operating systems, time and dates in
FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the
1st of January 1970 (the Unix "epoch"). Currently, that figure is stored
as a 32 bit integer, and will run out part way through 2038. By then we
should (hopefully) be using a counter of 64 bits (or greater) which
should be good until the end of the universe.</p>
<p>Note that the OS being Y2K compliant will not fix errant
applications that are not Y2K compliant.</p>
<p>Note also that the OS expects to read the current date and time from
the CMOS clock of your computer. Not all of these devices correctly
handle the year 2000. You are advised to test each platform individually
to ensure that your hardware clock behaves correctly when going from
1999 to 2000, and that it correctly interprets the year 2000 as a leap
year.</p>
<h2>Problematic applications</h2>
<p>This section is currently a placeholder. As we become aware of
applications that have a Y2K problem we will note them here, and also
attempt to indicate which versions (if any) of the software are
fixed.</p>
<h2>More information?</h2>
<p>If you have further questions about FreeBSD's year 2000 compliance, or
you have discovered an application running under FreeBSD that is not Y2K
compliant, please contact the project at <a
href="mailto:freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG">freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG</a>.</p>
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