[systemd-devel] systemd-timesync and journalctl questions

[David Weinehall]

We're having two time/date related issues/questions:

First of all we'd need some counterpart to ntpdate.

We have a system that lacks an RTC battery--the clock is reasonably reliable once the system
has booted, but every time the device is restarted it loses system time. Due to the use of the
machine we cannot allow the ntp server to run (since we need the clock to be monotonic).
Clock skew is OK, jumps aren't.

For this purpose we'd want an equivalent to ntpdate to be able to sync the clock once on boot,
so we can keep systemd-timesync disabled during runtime.

So far both manual reading and googling has failed to turn up any such mode of operation.
Is there any? If not, would it be hard to implement?

The second time-related issue pertains to journalctl.

It seems that journalctl logs (or at least displays) events in date/clock order, not in
sequence order. While this is definitely useful when trying to correlate different logs
against each other, it also means that events that happen after a date adjustment might
end up before already existing entries, thus breaking the sequentialness of the log,
as follows:

Date incorrect set to 2023:

Log message 1
Log message 2

Date corrected to be 2018:

Log message 3
Log message 1
Log message 2

Typically this is not how we want our log to behave. Is there any way to
show the log in sequential order?


Kind regards, David Weinehall