[arch-general] Systemd and time synchronisation problems

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2012-09-11 at 11:15 +0100, mike cloaked wrote:
> Recently I changed permanently to systemd - however I have noticed
> that the system clock is out by some minutes just after I have booted
> up and see for example:
> 
> [mike at lapmike3 ~]$ chronyc tracking
> Reference ID    : 178.32.55.58 (gateway.omega.org.uk)
> Stratum         : 3
> Ref time (UTC)  : Tue Sep 11 10:03:20 2012
> System time     : 158.888610840 seconds fast of NTP time
> Frequency       : 5.454 ppm fast
> Residual freq   : -1.577 ppm
> Skew            : 13.260 ppm
> Root delay      : 0.062475 seconds
> Root dispersion : 0.029119 seconds
> 
> I would not mind a second or two out - but 158 seconds is not
> acceptable - and if I reboot then the clock is immediately out by the
> same amount until it eventually re-syncs after quite a long time (10s
> of minutes!)
> 
> I thought I would check the hardware clock but :
> 
> [root at lapmike3 ~]# hwclock -r
> hwclock: Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
> hwclock: Use the --debug option to see the details of our search for
> an access method.
> 
> I had originally set up chrony which does eventually after some time
> get the system clock back in sync - I do have dumponexit in my
> /etc/chrony.conf but presume somewhere along the way in the transition
> from iniscripts there is a configuration error?
> 
> I have in my /etc/adjtime:
> 
> 0.000000 0 0.000000
> 0
> UTC
> 
> 
> I am running KDE - and until the system clock is re-synced it is quite
> a bit off - this presumable also means that mail time stamps will be
> wrong until the clock resets properly -
> 
> I have looked at the chrony and systemd arch wiki entries but I can't
> find a way to get this sorted out - can anyone help out?
> 
> Thanks

Just for the record. I'm not using systemd, but with Arch Linux I
experience that the clock most of the times goes wrong around 1.5 sec
after startup. I always run ntpdate manually after startup and I noticed
that, when rebooting between different distros or simply rebooting Arch.
1.5 sec isn't a serious issue, this will happen when not using the
computer too, but it's unusual that a currently synced clock goes wrong,
caused by a reboot. I guess there's something fishy, that might not
related to systemd. FWIW I'm using the regular kernel most of the times.