Subject: bug#65306: [shepherd] ntpd throws shepherd out of the loop

From: Csepp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:13:50 +0200

Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi Guix,
>
> I have a laptop that's a little stuck in the past… more accurately
> January of 2020 thanks to what I believe to be an empty CMOS battery. 
> As of recently (maybe it dates back longer, but I first experienced it
> two weeks ago and just now got to debugging it a little), Shepherd gets
> stuck at 100% CPU usage "early" on first boot.  I can prevent this
> issue by getting the system time "close enough" to the actual time
> before the NTP sync, but see the first sentence.  Not having a network
> connection also works, but that's somewhat unpractical.  Also, the high
> CPU usage still occurs if a sync is done later.  I have yet to
> encounter the bug post hibernation, but I also wish not to.  There
> doesn't appear to be anything particular interesting in the logs
> either.
>
> Cheers

This sounds like an issue with slow incremental system time updates,
although I don't understand why that would cause Shepherd to hang, but
maybe the NTP service is configured to only report itself as initialized
once it has finished synchronizing, which defeats the point of
incremental updating.
There is probably a config setting to tell ntpd to perform the update in
a single step, at least I know chrony has one.

ps.: don't wait until the battery starts leaking to replace it