Re: systemd, ntp, kernel and hwclock

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> writes:
> On Mon, 2017-02-27 at 16:09 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>> Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> writes:

>>> However, at the time when I ran ntpdate, ntp was not running.  I had
>>> brought up the network manually due to an interface renaming issue on
>>> the first boot.  Maybe when somebody runs ntpdate in a scenario like
>>> that the kernel is not sending the new date/time to the hardware
>>> clock.

>> Right, ntpdate for some reason doesn't set the flag to do this.
> [...]

> There is a very good reason, which is that without continuous
> adjustment the system clock cannot be assumed more stable than the RTC.

If you've literally just synced the system clock to a remote NTP server,
why could you not assume it was more accurate than the RTC?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>