Re: [gentoo-amd64] Recent clock problems

On Saturday 11 February 2006 18:41, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hello,
>    Just in the last week or so my AMD64 machine has started to exhibit
> problems with the clock. Maybe it's a hardware problem, or possibly
> it's some new ntpd issue after updates. At boot time it seems to be
> coming up with semi-random times. This is causing me to ask a few
> questions and try to learn a bit more about how this actually works
> under Linux. Thanks in advance.
>
> QUESTION 1: UTC vs. local
>
> In /etc/conf.d/clock I can choose UTC vs. local. Does this refer to
> the time I set in the hardware clock or something else? Nominally it's
> easier sitting here in California to set the hardware clock to
> California time. Is there any problem with doing this? If I understand
> the comments I should be using 'local' but the default seemed to be
> UTC.

it does not really matter which one you choose.

>
> QUESTION 2: date
>
> date only sets a software clock, correct? Is this all the system uses
> after boot?

man date says 'system time'. which is the 'software clock'

>
> QUESTION 3: hwclock -w
>
> This is supposed to write the time in the system's software clock into
> hardware, correct?

yes

>
> QUESTION 4:
>
> Does ntpd actually update the system clock, or is it another layer yet
> on top. If I use ntpd and then do hwclock -w does an accurate time get
> written to the hardware clock?
# If you want to sync the system clock to the hardware clock during
# shutdown, then say "yes" here.

CLOCK_SYSTOHC="yes"

btw, removing /etc/adjtime will help, if your clock behaves funny.
yes

you should open /etc/conf.d/clock and set this:
-- 
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