sinty-timedate

A native replacement for timedatectl on SintyOS. It queries and sets the system clock, timezone, hardware clock (RTC), and network-time state, and is a drop-in for the parts of timedatectl people actually use.

Why it exists

SintyOS does not boot with systemd. PID 1 is sinit and services are driven by atomctl. The stock timedatectl refuses to do anything in that world:

System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.

sinty-timedate talks to the kernel, the zoneinfo database, the RTC, and chrony/atomctl directly, so it works under sinit with no systemd and no D-Bus dependency. Where systemd's tool leans on systemd-timedated, this one:

• reads the clock via clock_gettime and sets it via clock_settime;
• resolves the timezone from the /etc/localtime symlink and /etc/timezone;
• reads and writes the RTC with the RTC_RD_TIME / RTC_SET_TIME ioctls on /dev/rtc0 (falling back to hwclock if no RTC device is reachable);
• reports "synchronized" from the kernel's own adjtimex status;
• reports and toggles network time by driving chrony.service through atomctl (atomctl start|stop chrony.service).

Usage

sinty-timedate [status]                  show the current time settings
sinty-timedate list-timezones            list all known timezones
sinty-timedate set-timezone ZONE         set the system timezone (root)
sinty-timedate set-time "Y-M-D H:M:S"     set the system clock and RTC (root)
sinty-timedate set-ntp true|false         enable/disable network time (root)
sinty-timedate set-local-rtc true|false   keep the RTC in local time (root)
sinty-timedate --help

status prints the same fields, in the same layout, as timedatectl:

$ sinty-timedate
               Local time: Sun 2026-07-12 22:00:41 CEST
           Universal time: Sun 2026-07-12 20:00:41 UTC
                 RTC time: Sun 2026-07-12 20:00:41
                Time zone: Europe/Rome (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

Privileged verbs check EUID == 0 and fail with a clear message otherwise. set-time refuses while network time is active, exactly as timedatectl does. set-ntp is a no-op with a clear message when atomctl is not present (e.g. on a developer host that is not running sinit).

The RTC time policy (UTC vs local) set by set-local-rtc is persisted in /etc/sinty-timedate.conf; everything else uses the standard system files.

Build

make build            # ./sinty-timedate
make static           # stripped static binary for the image
make test
go build ./...        # plain build

Requires Go >= 1.25 and Linux. The only non-stdlib dependency is golang.org/x/sys/unix, for the RTC ioctls and adjtimex.