[ale] Windows crashes L.A. Airport

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Kevin O'Neill Stoll wrote:

> Nice, so basically an inappropriate data type was used.
> Yayyyyyyyy! M$
>
> In Windows the Virtual Machine Manager (here after
> referred as VMM) is responsible for creation,
> execution, monitoring and termination of virtual
> machines. This VMM, which is a 32 bit, protected mode
> operating system, provides a number of system services
> at chip level of programming. One of these services is
> "Get_System_Time". This particular service loads the
> EAX register with the time in milliseconds since
> Windows started. This service is accurate to 1 ms. EAX
> is a 32 bit register. So the maximum number of
> milliseconds it can hold is (2^32)-1 = 4294967295
> milliseconds
>
>
> = 4294967.295 seconds
> = 71582.79 minutes
> = 1193 hours
> = 49.7 days
>
>
> So after 49.7 days the EAX resets to zero. Most of
> the Drivers use this Time Service to keep track of the
> Time out of various services they provide. So after
> 49.7 days the drives cannot use the get_System_Time
> function of VMM and they crash.
>
> http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20813834.html
>

Wait, I'm confused. Part of that post says: "Windows crashes automatically 
if you don't switch off the machine for 49.7 Days" implying that it's a 
windows problem, but many people on this list have attested to longer 
uptimes than 50 days, so I'm still unclear as to who's fault it is.

 	bjorn


-------------------
Bjorn Dittmer-Roche
XO Audio LLC

http://www.xowave.com
http://www.xoaudio.com