The system clock and the hardware clock are used for different purposes on a Linux system. The system clock is maintained by the operating system, and the hardware clock is maintained in BIOS. The hardware clock will continue to keep time when the computer is powered off, thanks to the CMOS battery on the motherboard. The system clock maintains time by querying online time servers whenever the computer is powered on.
The hardware clock will set the time for the system clock upon installation if there is no internet connection. Apart from this scenario, there is little use for the hardware clock in Linux. Instead, Linux uses systemd to synchronize the system time with online servers or an NTPD server.
Linux programs and services will rely on the system clock, not the hardware clock. Usually, the hardware clock will get synchronized to the system time whenever the computer is powered off. This way, the hardware time can remain accurate and will not drift off more than a few milliseconds while the computer is off, usually. In this tutorial, you will learn the difference between system clock and hardware clock, and about commands that can be used to view or set the hardware clock and system clock in Linux.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- What is the difference between hardware clock and system clock
- How to view and set the hardware clock
- How to view and set the system time and time zone

Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Any Linux distro |
Software | hwclock, date, timedatectl |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
System Clock vs Hardware Clock on Linux
Now that you know the difference between the system clock and hardware clock, you can try out some of the commands below to view the times and change them as needed.
- You can view the time of the hardware clock with the following command. This time can also be seen in the BIOS or UEFI screen.
$ sudo hwclock 2022-10-08 15:00:00.885214-0400
- The
date
command is usually the most common way to query the system time in Linux.$ date Sat Oct 8 15:00:09 EDT 2022
- Use the
timedatectl
command to see all relevant information about your system clock.$ timedatectl Local time: Sat 2022-10-08 15:01:58 EDT Universal time: Sat 2022-10-08 19:01:58 UTC RTC time: Sat 2022-10-08 19:01:59 Time zone: America/New_York (EDT, -0400) System clock synchronized: yes systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes RTC in local TZ: no
- If your system time is different than your hardware clock time, you can use the
--systohc
option to change the hardware clock to the current system clock time.$ sudo hwclock --systohc
- It also works the other way around. To set the system clock time from the hardware clock use the
--hctosys
option.$ sudo hwclock --hctosys
- If you’d like to set the system clock to some arbitrary date and time, ensure that time synchronization is off and use the following
date
command. This command will set the date and time to10 January 2021, 12:00 PM
, but substitute any values you want.$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp off $ sudo date -s "10 JAN 2021 12:00:00"
- To set the system time to be synchronized to a particular time zone:
$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Sydney
And view the list of available time zomes:
$ timedatectl list-timezones Australia/Adelaide Australia/Brisbane Australia/Broken_Hill Australia/Currie Australia/Darwin Australia/Eucla Australia/Hobart Australia/Lindeman Australia/Lord_Howe Australia/Melbourne Australia/Perth Australia/Sydney ....
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we learned about the differences between the system clock and hardware clock on a Linux system. We also saw how to set the hardware clock and system clock using hwclock
and timedatectl
commands. Keeping both clocks accurately synced is highly recommended for your system to continue running as expected.