RTC problem

[Aragon Gouveia]

adjkerntz(8) ?


| By Bernd Walter <ticso at cicely7.cicely.de>
|                                          [ 2008-06-30 17:30 +0200 ]
> This is not about a specific hardware - I have a general problem.
> Normaly I run ntpdate and ntpd - ntpdate sets the time on boot and
> then ntpd takes over to keep it in sync.
> What recently happend was that a server with a multiple years uptime
> rebootet because of a power failure and the local ntp-server wasn't
> up early enough, so ntpdate didn't set the clock.
> ntpd didn't tune the clock either, because the offset was too big.
> I know from debugging RTC support on arm, that the RTC only gets
> written on explizit time setting with ntpdate, date and such.
> But since ntpd only tunes the softclock and never sets the RTC it
> allows the RTC to run completely unsyncronized.
> Is there a way to regulary trigger a write to the RTC without
> disturbing ntpd, so that the offset never gets large?
> Of course I can configure ntpd to accept a large offset, but it seems
> wrong to me that the RTC runs unsyncronized for a large time.