who -b does not report the time of the last system boot correctly.

[Michael Yam]

"who -b" always returns the "birth of Unix"

         system boot 1969-12-31 19:00

regardless of when the system was rebooted. It should return the time when the system was rebooted. In contrast, "uptime" works correctly.

I've observed this bug only on Raspian (the older Debian 4.1.19+ works correctly).

uname -a:
Linux babylon5 4.19.93+ #1290 Fri Jan 10 16:34:37 GMT 2020 armv6l GNU/Linux

dpkg --list coreutils:
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
ii coreutils 8.30-3 armhf GNU core utilities

[peter green (plugwash)]

I suspect this relates to the raspbery pi's lack of real time clock, meaning a sane time isn't established until later in the boot process (first by fake-hwclock restoring a saved time, then later by ntp applying corrections from the network).

[Michael Yam (myam)]

That's a pretty reasonable assessment. As bugs go, this one is a minor inconsistency.