I’m seeing a very strange issue on a System76 Lemur Pro (lemp11).
What I’ve observed:
Fresh install of Fedora Silverblue → system boots with the wrong date/time.
The issue also occurs on Secureblue (which is based on Silverblue).
chronyd is running, but the system is sometimes not synchronized after boot.
Resetting or changing the DNS configuration causes the clock to immediately jump to the correct time.
The confusing part is that I can’t reproduce this on other distributions. The same laptop behaves normally with Fedora Workstation and Pop!_OS.
I haven’t been able to reproduce it on a ThinkPad X280/T480. The clock on those work fine post install.
That makes me wonder if this is something specific to the Silverblue/Atomic boot process or service ordering on this hardware, rather than a failing RTC or CMOS battery.
Has anyone seen something similar, particularly on System76 hardware? Any ideas on what to investigate next or which logs would be most useful?
I’d be happy to provide more details or run additional tests.
Check whether your BIOS settings show the system clock UTC or adjusted to your timezone.
Windows stores hardware clock time in your local timezone. Other operating systems usually store it in UTC. If you’re dual booting, this could cause issues.
It’s also possible that saving the current time to the hardware clock in silverblue/secureblue is misonfigured in some way.
You should probably check your system time in BIOS. It is a very common issue I have personally encountered.
My secondary laptop had an issue where the time would be wrong whenever I booted it up. I’d make sure the system was set to the right timezone, but it always required me manually setting the time, even restarting ntpd (and making sure I had internet) didn’t work.
The problem was pretty clear, because the time would be off by years: the issue was that the hardeare clock was set incorrectly in the BIOS, because I use it so infrequently that it would lose all charge in the interim and the BIOS would be reset. Setting the hardware clock correctly fixed everything.
