AFAIK, at least historically, the hardware battery clock time is expected 
(without some tweaks, to the extent that a given version allowed those) by 
Windows to be in local time.  Operating systems that keep their internal time 
in something else (.e.g. Unix and related, where it's supposed to be in GMT, 
with the TZ environment variable providing an offset to local time as desired) 
already have to deal with that (and probably with the possibility of it running 
in GMT instead).

It seems to me that a virtualization environment should simulate an RTC clock 
for the guest, and should simply keep track of the offset between that time and 
the host's internal time, to be used to supply an initial value when the guest 
is started.

Both virtualization and dual boot get tricky if there are mixed assumptions as 
to the RTC being in local vs GMT, especially with the addition of daylight 
saving time, and most particularly if the guest or less common boot environment 
is active at start or end of DST.
It takes some care on the part of all OS and virtualization product producers 
_and_ the person setting up such a system, to get the whole situation right.

It would probably be helpful if the OP provided more details of whether dual 
boot or virtualization was involved in their situations;  and also if someone 
would write up a good guide to cases where Solaris/OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana was 
host or guest or primary or alternate boot with various other common OSs, on 
how to successfully keep the time consistent (unless something other than 
consistency was intentional!) across all environments.

AFAIK, for semi-modern versions of Windows, there are settings that can allow 
the RTC to run in GMT and still have the OS in local time (with or without 
DST).  I think most other OSs should also be happy with that, or be easily able 
to be made happy with that.  It's what I'd do if I had a multi-boot Intel box 
that was having issues with getting the time right on some of the OSs.

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:43 PM, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:

> 
> No, I think he meant resetting the time in the BIOS of the VM.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gary Driggs [mailto:gdri...@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 1:42 PM
> To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ntpd not keeping time in sync
> 
> On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Gary Gendel wrote:
> 
>> I suppose this could be true of a virtual machine resetting the time as
> well.
> 
> A guest OS should never be allowed to adjust its hosts clock. Sometimes a
> failing motherboard battery can cause issues but NTP should be correcting
> them. Have you tried resarting or disabling/enabling the service?
> 
> -Gary D
> _______________________________________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> 

-- 
The waitress asked, "Do you want lemon or no lemon with that iced tea?"
Naturally, I said "yes", and then burst out laughing, because there simply
wasn't any other answer in Boolean logic.  She didn't get it, but I got
the lemon, which I wanted anyway.  Later, I realized a quantum computer
could have offered another answer: Schroedinger's Lemon!


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