[gentoo-amd64] Recent clock problems

[Mark Knecht]

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.

QUESTION 2: date

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

QUESTION 3: hwclock -w

This is supposed to write the time in the system's software clock into
hardware, correct?

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?

   Thanks in advance for your help.

cheers,
Mark

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