Re: [gentoo-dev] Defining TZ in the base system profile?

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 2023-01-18 at 20:48 -0500, Joshua Kinard wrote:
> So this article[1] from 2017 popped up again on the tech radar via hackernews[2] and a few other sites[3].  It
> annotates how if the envvar TZ is undefined on a Linux system, it causes glibc to generate a number of
> additional syscalls, mainly stat-related calls (in my tests, newfstatat()).  If defined to an actual value,
> such as ":/etc/localtime" (or even an empty string), glibc will instead generate far fewer, if any at all, of
> these stat-related syscalls.
>
> [...]
> So is adding a default definition of TZ to our base system /etc/profile something we want to look at?  I
> haven't tried any other methods of benchmarking to see if not making those additional syscalls is just placebo
> or if there are actual impacts.  Given how long this oddity has been around, I can't tell if it's a genuine
> bug in glibc, an unoptimized corner case, or just a big nothingburger.
>

Am I correct that there's no real difference between setting it to
":/etc/localtime" and the actual timezone?

I suppose it would make sense to default it.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny