chrony fail with adjtimex error

[mcloaked]

Some days ago I started to notice that chrony fails to start. I had the same on an i686 netbook. There is a bug report for arch at https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/43689 that refers to an upstream report for the kernel.

On my cubox system I worked around this using systemd-timesyncd after disabling chrony for the moment until this bug is fixed. That works fine but the RTC slowly drifts over time as it is not periodically resynced with the system time, so I manually write the system time to the RTC with hwclock --systohc every few days.

Does anyone else have a better workaround until chrony is working again?

[WarheadsSE]

systemd timers

[mcloaked]

I know what systemd timers are but I don't think this is a solution in this case since once the system is booted up trying to restart the chrony service with systemctl simply gives a fatal error referring to the same adjtimex issue, and the service fails to start. So using a timer to delay start will not help.

The Fedora bug report linked in the LKML thread seems to imply that there is a kernel patch that resolves this so presumably that will feed down to our kernels at some point. I also found a description of what seems to be behind the issue at http://chrony.tuxfamily.org/FAQ.html#question_7.1 and this almost implies that recompiling the chrony package might provide a fix!

[planeteater]

Possible fix: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1188074