On 2011-07-15 18:45, Anton Aylward wrote:
Greg Freemyer said the following on 07/15/2011 10:36 AM:
I can say with certainty that openSUSE on that laptop gets the time horribly wrong on reboot. (ie. its off by months.)
What you are saying is that the hardware clock is out. That is a hardware problem. As long as you shut down properly the hwclock program will write the system time to the hardware clock.
Another cause of that problem is a bad "/etc/adjtime" file. The purpose of this file is to adjust or compensate for time drift in the hardware clock (the cmos clock that runs when the machine is off). When the machine boots, it reads the time from that clock, and gets adjusted by hwclock using that file. If at some time there were a huge, manual, intervention, setting the clock up by a month, the file has record of that adjustement, and will repeat it on the following boots... The cure is to delete that file, forcing it to be recalculated. As to the original question: hwclock is used, at least, on boot and on halt. It is not related to ntp, except that it assumes that the clock is perfectly adjusted when the system goes down. It doesn't matter if the reference is ntp, a gps clock, or that cronny I don't know about. It is responsible for the clock being correct after boot and before an external reference can be asked, so IMO it better not be removed. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 11.4 x86_64 "Celadon" at Telcontar)