polite-hwclock-hctosys

Like hwclock --hctosys, but gradually like ntpd if possible. You can run it as a daemon where it checks for time sync once a second, or as a once-off. Originally designed to work around WSL2's clock skew.

Blog post: https://www.nplus1.com.au/wsl2-clock-skew-fix/

Compiling

cd polite-hwclock-hctosys
make

You need a gcc or compatible that supports C17. clang will probably work but I didn't test it. Tested with gcc and Ubuntu 2022.04.

Installing

For Systemd:

sudo make install-systemd
sudo systemctl enable polite-hwclock-hctosys

For System V init:

sudo make install-systemv
sudo update-rc.d polite-hwclock-hctosys defaults  # Debian, Ubuntu and friends
sudo chkconfig polite-hwclock-hctosys on          # Red Hat, Centos etc

WSL2 does not have a "normal" System V startup process so you need to explicitly tell WSL2 to start polite-hwclock-hctosys. For Windows 11, create/edit /etc/wsl.conf with these lines:

[boot]
command="/etc/init.d/polite-hwclock-hctosys start"

For Windows 10 you need to add the following to your ~/.bash_profile:

wsl.exe -u root /etc/init.d/polite-hwclock-hctosys start

Uninstalling

sudo make uninstall

Starting

sudo /etc/init.d/polite-hwclock-hctosys start     # System V
sudo systemctl start polite-hwclock-hctosys       # Systemd

Single-shot, debugging and latest usage information

polite-hwclock-hctosys once     # Run once and exit
polite-hwclock-hctosys once -v  # Run once and say a lot about it
polite-hwclock-hctosys          # Prints usage message.

Please submit bug and feature requests!