Quote Originally Posted by birdman View Post
I think it sets one. Easy enough to check that, though.

It was the future fake_hwclock that was the issue, but I'd forgotten that you had a double advance.

Perhaps ntp should be taking its own lock when it working....given that there is nothing else to stop it being run twice on any system. It shoudln't be relying on any external mutex mechanism.
The future fake-hwclock is the result of ntpdate being run twice at the same time and corrupting the system clock. Then the stored false future value in fake-hwclock.data carries forward into the next boot and so on.

ntpd on a linux system generally runs on its own and is never initiated or run by user processes. On a linux system ntpdate is only run once at startup and even that is deprecated in favour of running ntpd with a flag to step the system time once at boot, then slew time subsequently. SpaceRat was trying to do similar with ntpdate