Suse Handling of Daylight Saving Time (DST) change

Most server hardware clocks are use UTC. UTC stands for the Universal Time, Coordinated, also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Other time zones are determined by adding or subtracting from the UTC time. Server typically displays local time, which now is subject of DST correction twice a year. 

Wikipedia defines DST as follows:

Daylight saving time (DST), also known as summer time in British English, is the convention of advancing clocks so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour in late winter or early spring and are adjusted backward in autumn. 

DST patch is only required in few countries such as USA.  Please see this wikipedia article.

Linux will change to and from DST when the HWCLOCK setting  in /etc/sysconfig/clock  is set to -u, i.e. when the hardware clock is set to UTC (which is closely related to GMT), regardless of whether Linux was running at the time DST is entered or left.

When the HWCLOCK setting is set to `--localtime', Linux will not adjust the time, operating under the assumption that your system may be a dual boot system at that time and that the other OS takes care of the DST switch. If that was not the case, the DST change needs to be made manually.

Note:

EST is defined as being GMT-5 all year round. US/Eastern, on the other hand, means GMT-5 or GMT-4 depending on whether Daylight Savings Time (DST) is in effect or not.

The tzdata package contains data files with rules for various timezones around the world. When this package is updated, it will update multiple timezone changes for all previous timezone fixes.

he local time as seen by regular applications under Linux is based on two things:

• The system time
• The TZ (for timezone) environment variable

$ cd /usr/share/zoneinfo ; find | grep EST
./EST
./right/EST
./right/EST5EDT
./posix/EST
./posix/EST5EDT
./EST5EDT

These zoneinfo files, part of the timezone package, are not human-readable. To check the data in them, use the zdump command. For example,

$ zdump  EST
EST  Thu Oct 24 18:09:54 2013 EST

$ zdump -v EST
EST  -9223372036854775808 = NULL
EST  -9223372036854689408 = NULL
EST  9223372036854689407 = NULL
EST  9223372036854775807 = NULL

NEWS CONTENTS

• 190419 : Support Daylight Saving Time (DST) Handling in Linux ( Support Daylight Saving Time (DST) Handling in Linux, )

Old News ;-)

Support Daylight Saving Time (DST) Handling in Linux

System time and hardware clock

The Linux kernel maintains a system time. This time is initialized at boot time using the hardware clock(also known as real time clock, RTC, BIOS clock or CMOS clock). As the hardware clock does not provide information as to whether it is kept in UTC or in local time, this needs to be configured explicitly, in YaST -> System -> /etc/sysconfig Editor -> System -> Environment -> Clock -> HWCLOCK.

Linux changing to and from DST

Linux will change to and from DST when the HWCLOCK setting is set to `-u', i.e. when the hardware clock is set to UTC (which is closely related to GMT), regardless of whether Linux was running at the time DST is entered or left.

When the HWCLOCK setting is set to `--localtime', Linux will not adjust the time, operating under the assumption that your system may be a dual boot system at that time and that the other OS takes care of the DST switch. If that was not the case, the DST change needs to be made manually.

Regular applications

T

Java applications

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) includes its own, slightly different, timezone database. Thus, when the timezone definitions change, the JRE should be updated as well.

Additional Information

Manually updating timezone data for regular applications

To address the time zone changes that have not been updated in currently available updates, the following manual process can be used to update systems immediately.

Notes about this process:

1. These "manual" changes WILL be lost if updates are applied to the system that do not contain the corrected timezone information. The timezone information is included in the timezone package. Applying older versions of this or related packages should be followed by re-applying these "manual" changes.

2. These "manual" changes do not require a reboot of the system. Some applications may have cached information in memory and will not re-read these changes. A reboot may be useful to ensure all applications have read the updated timezone data.
   

Detailed steps for the manual process:

1. Download the most recent time zone data file (at the time of writing, tzdata2007b.tar.gz) from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/. Updates to this data file have the year and release letter updated.
2. Copy the file to a temporary workspace of your choice on the Linux system.
3. Extract the data with the following command:
   

   tar xvfz tzdata2007b.tar.gz

4. Apply the updates for the region(s) of interest the system's time zone data through the zic command. E.g., to update the North American data, run
   

   zic northamerica

5. Relink the new time zone names with the old time zone names that were just updated with the following command: (See the Additional Notes below for a workaround to possible error(s) in this step.)
   

   zic backward

6. Verify that the updates are applied correctly with the following command
   

   zdump -v timezoneofinterest | grep yearofinterest
   

   e.g
   

   zdump -v Canada/Mountain | grep 2007
   

   The output from the previous step should look similar to this:
   Canada/Mountain Sun Mar 11 08:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 MST isdst=0 gmtoff=-25200
   Canada/Mountain Sun Mar 11 09:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 02:00:00 2007 MST isdst=1 gmtoff=-21600
   Canada/Mountain Sun Nov 4 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 MST isdst=1 gmtoff=-21600
   Canada/Mountain Sun Nov 4 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 02:00:00 2007 MST isdst=0 gmtoff=-25200
7. Relink the localtime setting (in /etc/localtime) with the corrected timezone information using the following command
   

   zic -l timezonename
   

   e.g.
   

   zic -l Canada/Mountain

Note: If you encounter error(s) executing zic backward
Executing zic backward may return errors if other time zone data is not recent enough. One option would be to update those time zone as well in the same manner as noted in step 4 after identifying the specific time zones involved.
A workaround in this situation is to extract only the time zones from backward that need to be re-linked following execution of step 4 above. In this case that would be the time zones that are listed in the northamerica file. The following steps can be substitued for step 5 above:

grep 'America' backward > backward.america
zic backward.america

Validating DST changes for Java

To validate whether DST changes occur on the correct date for Java code, the following test code can be used:

import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;

class testdst {
public static void main(String args[]){
if((args.length != 4)){
if((args.length == 1) && args[0].equals("-list")){
System.out.println("Available time zones are:");
String[] list = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();
int i;

for(i = 0; i < list.length; i++)
System.out.println(list[i]);
} else {
System.out.println("Usage testdst ");
System.out.println("or testdst -list");
}
System.exit(1);
}
TimeZone t = TimeZone.getTimeZone(args[0]);
System.out.println("Using time zone " + t.getDisplayName());
System.out.println("Use parameter -list to get a list of available time zones");
GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar(t);
int year = new Integer(args[1]).intValue() - 1900;
int month = new Integer(args[2]).intValue() - 1;
int day = new Integer(args[3]).intValue();

Date d = new Date(year, month, day, 12, 0);
System.out.println("Testing date " + DateFormat.getDateInstance().format(d));
cal.setTime(d);

int offset_day = cal.get(Calendar.DST_OFFSET);
Date d2 = new Date(year, month, day-1, 12, 0);
cal.setTime(d2);

int offset_preday = cal.get(Calendar.DST_OFFSET);

if(offset_day == offset_preday)
System.out.println("There was no change in the daylight saving time offset");
else
System.out.println("The daylight saving time offset was changed");

System.exit(0);
}
}

Please refer to the documentation of the Java SDK and runtime environment for details on how to compile and run it.

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For general information about DST, please refer to Wikipedia,Daylight saving time, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time.

For information about the zoneinfo database which is the basis for the timezone information in the timezone package, refer to Wikipedia, Zoneinfo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoneinfo.

• TID 3094409 - (DST Master TID) Time zone and Daylight Saving Changes for Novell Products - 2006, 2007 and 2008
• TID 3853518 - U.S. Daylight Saving Time (DST) default dates changing in 2007 and its impact on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise products

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Last modified: March 12, 2019