[fedora-arm] Dealing with lack of a real time clock

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
> A lot of the arm boards, or so I have been told, are like mine; no rtc.

Pretty much all boards, well at least the 20 odd I have, have a RTC,
the problem is that they aren't battery backed.

> This is causing a lot of interesting problems with boot up until ntp can set
> the time (or is it ntpdate?).

chrony is the default. What are the "interesting" problems?

> So I was thing of how to 'fix' this.  Over on the Redsleeve list a fellow
> that is dealing with this on his RasberryPi noted:
> http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Nortc
>
> This might be one solution if someone took it on (I have no skills in coding
> or building packages).
>
> But I was thinking of a scripted approach.
>
> First you need a file that has date/time in a format that it can be piped
> into the date command like:
>
> date < /etc/fixtime
>
> The image build process would put the build date into this file for
> starters.  At firstboot, if the time is near zero (some seconds having
> passed since poweron), a few things happen:
>
> The fixtime script is run to set the time to the image build date/time.
> The fixtime script is set to run at every boot as one of the first
> processes.
> A cron job is enabled (hourly or dayly) to update /etc/fixtime so the next
> boot will have a more current time.
>
> I probably have the skills to write a fixtime script and a cron fixtime
> update, but I don't know how to alter the boot process.  But I think that
> such a process is needed to address all the little oddities that come up
> when the system boots with time ZERO.  And think about desktop setup where
> only after the user logs into wireless can ntp get the time.

A lot of networks, even with restricted wifi networks, provide ntp to
ensure sync of time before login.

Peter