[chrony-users] drift file issue, possible chronyd bug?

[Tor Rune Skoglund <trs@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello List,

I am new to the list, so apologies if I am violating any posting rules or etiquette.

My company is using chrony on in-vehicle systems. Due to the nature of the installations, power might be lost randomly even if there is ignition power control. Some days ago we experienced something we believe might be a rare bug in chronyd:

The system is using this drift file: /var/lib/chrony/drift . On this particular system, the drift file had had its permissions and type changed to this:

# ls -l /var/lib/chrony/drift  
prwx------ 1 root root 0 Nov 28 16:54 /var/lib/chrony/drift

We do not know the reason for this change. The system is not something someone can log into, so one theory is a file system error, another is some kind of bug in chronyd.

However, due to the file type and permissions change, on the next reboot, the openrc init.d script fails to start chronyd and just hangs forever, blocking the boot process from proceeding. The core problem here is of course the file change, but we think that chronyd still should not block forever due to this, but rather report an error.

The init script starts chronyd with these options: /usr/sbin/chronyd -f /etc/chrony/chrony.conf -s -r

Adding --background to start-stop-daemon prevents blocking the boot process, but chronyd still hangs indefinitely.

The system is based on Gentoo. chronyd is version 4.1. Kernel is 4.9.

Let me know if addition info is needed.

BR, Tor Rune Skoglund