[systemd-devel] systemd 28 time handling changes "breaks" ntpdate and date ?

Martin Langhoff martin.langhoff at gmail.com
Wed Apr 25 08:28:14 PDT 2012


Apologies if this has been discussed -- a search through the archives
didn't find anything.

Reading the announcement of systemd v28...

"At shutdown we no longer invoke "hwclock --systohc", i.e. do not write
the system clock back to the RTC. Why? In general there's not really a
reason to assume that the system clock was anymore correct than the RTC
so it's probably a good idea to leave the RTC untouched."

While gnome control panel has been fixed to the new world order, this
currently breaks ntpdate and date (as of current Fedora 17 at least).
I am overall happy with systemd, yet I imagine many surprised
sysadmins, finding that the effects of old trusty date -s and ntpdate
are gone after a reboot _by design_.

date, ntpdate and the halt scripts in all distros have confabulated
for the longest of times to hide the difference between "OS time" and
"RTC clock time". "Setting the system time" means for most users
"setting the machine time", not just the OS/kernel time.

Are there plans to fix them? I easily can see people getting upset over this...



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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