Re: [opensuse] chrony and hwclock

Greg Freemyer said the following on 07/15/2011 10:36 AM:


I believe that is the theory, but I setup a dedicated laptop to act as
a weather station a couple years ago. openSUSE based.

And I can say openSUSE on bootup does NOT behave that way. I suspect
ntpd is way too slow to kick off and get things straightened out.

NTP has a lot that can be configured.
Running it 'out of the box' means that you are using the distribution
settings, not ones suited to your specific context.

I can say with certainty that openSUSE on that laptop gets the time
horribly wrong on reboot. (ie. its off by months.)

What you are saying is that the hardware clock is out. That is a
hardware problem. As long as you shut down properly the hwclock program
will write the system time to the hardware clock.

Try running 'hwclock -r' to read it.

It may be you hardware is faulty..

just as an experiment, try setting it, wait a bit, then red back

# hwclock -w

wait a few hours or days

# hwclock -r

Then go and read about the "--adjust" option on 'hwclock'





On my laptop, even my father's old 2002 laptop, the hardware clock keeps
reasonable (within a second or two) time. Even when shut down for weeks
on end.




NTP comes along and fixes it in short order, but I always have a few
weather readings from the wrong month in the mix. Fortunately the
bios date is months behind, so the data just impacts old data I don't
care about.

It sounds like you have some hardware issues.




Roger, I suspect you need to decide if debugging the openSUSE bootup /
time control is what you should be doing vs.moving to Chrony.

I agree.

I personally suspect Chrony won't help.

I agree.

Instead, I suspect the
problem is in the order of how the init scrips are called.

Almost certainly!


That is
the bios clock is clearly used in the early boot phases and if you
start depending on the time prior to NTP / Chrony coming to life, you
get bogus data.

In my case, NTP uses the Internet sites for time but it seems to be
invoked before the network is up,

Ah! Perhaps 'systemd' will be able to cure that :-)



so it takes quite a while to fix the
machines time. And when it does that, it must not be updating the
bios clock, or it wouldn't be so horribly far off.

That is possible, but your description makes me wonder if your hardware
is suspect.



Again, debugging the NTP setup / package is where I would focus
effort, not in switching to Chrony.

I agree.

Either way, you will likely have
to do your own package level debugging to get things the way you want
them.

And the experimentation/profiling I mentioned earlier.
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