hwclock: Keeping time with you

I wasn’t going to include hwclock because I assumed there wasn’t much here to explain or show. That’s partly true.

But hwclock has, in the past, been a crucial tool for keeping out-of-date machines on time, literally.

These days that’s not so much a problem for me; my oldest machine is a single core beast, but it still has more than enough oomph to avoid clock slippage.

Such was not always the case, particularly as hardware drifts back over the past 10 or 15 years. I’ve had machines with weak CMOS batteries that needed regular updating, or machines that would lose their bead on time if the workload got too heavy.

In those cases, a combination of ntpdate and hwclock usually did the trick (yes, I know ntpdate is technically deprecated).

And to be honest, I still use those two from time to time, to correct time to time (puns intended). ntpdate syncs, hwclock with the -w flag writes it out to the hardware.

There’s more that hwclock can do and if you build systems from almost nothing, it becomes important that you know how to use it. As it is though, I’ve already said too much about very little, and I know your time is valuable. 😉

One last toy before the H section is finished. Amazing. … 😯

P.S., hwclock is in util-linux, depending on your distro.