[ntp:questions] Hardware clock fails to update.

Bryan Henderson bryanh at giraffe-data.com
Fri Aug 4 02:32:42 UTC 2006


>Various internet searches pointed to the fact that hardware clock syncing 
>being placed under the responsibility of ntp.

Sort of.  Ntpd on Linux does a system call that tells the kernel "I'm
keeping the system clock set to authoritative time."  Based on that
information, the kernel copies the system clock time to the hardware
clock every 11 minutes in an attempt to keep the hardware clock also
correct.  If you weren't running Ntpd, you'd have to keep your hardware
clock correct some other way.

The hardware clock, for historical reasons, keeps a local time value
-- i.e. you have to interpret it in the context of a particular time
zone and it won't tell you which one -- you have to know
independently.  Since your error is a whole number of hours, I suspect
the problem is that someone's idea of that time zone is different from
someone else's.

The kernel has no idea what that time zone is, so its every-11-minute
update adjusts only the sub-hour part of the clock; i.e. it cannot
recognize or correct a 7200 second error.

>how can I check that NTP tries to update the hardware clock? 

The canonical program for manipulating the hardware clock is 'hwclock'.
You can run it with no options to see what time the hardware clock has
and see whether and when it is 7200 seconds wrong.

To confirm that the kernel believes Ntpd is keeping the system clock
authoritative (and therefore should be updating the hardware clock),
run 'adjtimex --print' and look at the "status" line.  The value is a
decimal number.  Expressed as a binary number, the "64" digit should
be 0.

>Upon restarting, the clock returns to its 7200 second offset. 

Somewhere in the startup scripts, something should run Hwclock in
order to set the system clock from the hardware clock to hold it over
until Ntpd can get going.  Maybe all you have to do is use 'hwclock
--systohc' once to set it to the proper hour and it will be OK at the
next boot.


There's a lot of information about the hardware clock and this oddball
kernel updating function in the man page for Hwclock.

-- 
Bryan Henderson                                    Phone 408-621-2000
San Jose, California



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