Debugging time

[Ivan Voras]

Hi

After much frustration I found out what was wrong with my LiveCD (thread
"LiveCD trouble"): it was all in the environment. I'm developing and
testing everything under VMWare, and for some reason, when booted from
the CD, FreeBSD thinks the "current date" is in 1937, which causes all
sorts of trouble (among other things, it's not a valid date for time_t).

The "BIOS" in the VM is set up correctly and it always shows the current
date.

The date is set wrong either on boot or very early after the kernel has
booted (I've verified it's wrong before hostid rc.d script, which is one
of the first to be executed).

How can debug this? Can I show the "current date" from the loader
prompt, before the kernel has booted? The same kernel and loader (except
the early cdboot part) work fine when booted from a hard drive.

Has anyone seen this behaviour, with or without VMWare?