systemd, ntp, kernel and hwclock

[Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>]

Hi all,

I've observed a system that had a wildly incorrect hardware clock (when
it was first unboxed), I ran ntpdate to sync the kernel clock but after
a shutdown and startup again it had a wacky time again.

I came across the discussion about how the hardware clock is no longer
set at shutdown[1]

The system has ntpd running

Looking at the output of
   adjtimex --print | grep status

the bit corresponding to 64 / STA_UNSYNC is 0

There is a time and date page on the wiki[2] and in the manual[3],
neither of them appears to have up to date information about the way it
works with systemd or how to troubleshoot issues like this.

Monitoring it with:

    hwclock -r ; date

shows that the hardware clock is running slowly, losing maybe 1s per
hour.  I would have expected that if the kernel is syncing to the
hardware clock every 11 minutes then I wouldn't see such changes.

Can anybody make any suggestions or add anything to the wiki?

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755722
2. https://wiki.debian.org/DateTime
3.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/system-administrator/ch-sysadmin-time.html