Strange Bios Issue

Inviere

So bit of a head scratcher here. I've an Unraid PC scheduled to Wake on RTC at 16:00 every day. Up until the clocks changed there a while back, there was no issue with this at all. Over the course of the pandemic, I've not been relying on the RTC to wake the pc up as I've been home a lot more, but the other day I let it reach the scheduled time (16:00) to wake up itself...which it did not.

Looking in the BIOS, I can see the clock is one hour behind. Ah, that makes sense I thought...so I fixed the time, saved the settings, and felt that was job done. The next day, to test it, I waited again....still no power on at 16:00. Checked the bios again, the time was again wrong, behind by exactly one hour. I fixed it again, saved, made some other changes to see if they were saving, and thought that HAS to be it, all the other changes saved.

There yesterday, I tested it again to see if it'd wake on RTC at the chosen time. Nope, still didn't boot. Checked the bios again, back one hour behind again. The time is perfectly set, just one hour exactly behind...what it would have been if the clocks didn't change. The other settings I've changed have indeed saved, which rules out the cmos battery. The pc is scheduled through Unraid to shutdown every night at midnight, so I reckon that's when the time is being overridden, as once I fix the time, shutdown, power up, and check again...it's saving. So between 12:00 & 16:00 the time is being set back automatically by one hour.

I've scoured the entire bios for a DST setting, region setting, NTP setting....nothing. The only settings related to time are the basic clock settings, set the time & date...that's it. I figured it MUST be pulling the time from elsewhere, as it keeps overriding what I've put in. I've checked within Unraid itself, the time there is perfectly set, correct time, correct time zone, no issues.

The Motherboard is a n Asus Prime X470-PRO - has anyone any suggestions on how to fix this? I suppose a workaround would be to change the RTC wake up event to 15:00, but I'd like to resolve it properly

EDIT - I flashed the bios to the latest version too, doesn't change anything.

Cuddlesworth

Its pulling the time from the OS and its probably pulling down UTC only. I don't think there is any standard as to how a bios is expected to pull time from the OS, so I guess that model decided on UTC time only.

Inviere

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Its pulling the time from the OS and its probably pulling down UTC only. I don't think there is any standard as to how a bios is expected to pull time from the OS, so I guess that model decided on UTC time only.

Hmm, I did check the Unraid time settings and they appear correct, as seen here:



As of now, that time/date are correct. However, notice the UTC+00:00? Seemingly that's wrong, as in Dublin we are UTC+01:00...

However, within Unraid...that setting pushes me +1 hour ahead



So should I just turn off NTP in Unraid, and configure the time manually?

Inviere

Well, it seems this behaviour is normal for a linux environment during shutdown (to push UTC to the bios) - https://forums.unraid.net/topic/87929-unraid-changes-bios-clock-time/

The solution will be to align the bios rtc with the current utc time, and compensate for the offset by altering the wake on rtc time. A bit annoying, but not the end of the world.

Cuddlesworth

Weird that UNraid both applies daylight savings but doesn't mention doing so.

Inviere

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Weird that UNraid both applies daylight savings but doesn't mention doing so.

Best I can deduce, is that it's seeking a UTC+0 time-update (regardless of user config) on shutdown and pushing that to the bios. I tried setting the timezone in Unraid to UTC+1 (which is what Ireland is, but not according to Unraid settings as this sets Unraid one hour too far ahead), and shutting down to see if the bios clock would then be correct. It wasn't, it was still 1 hour behind. So I've no idea what's actually going on...seems an Unraid issue to me...I mean they give you the option of setting the timezone through the GUI...so why isn't that being passed to the bios on shutdown instead of a mandatory UTC+0 being pushed?

For now I've just set the RTC Alarm to 15:00, which hopefully will wake the machine up today at 16:00.

ED E

Just to be sure, no BMC on your board?

Inviere

ED E wrote: »

Just to be sure, no BMC on your board?

Nah don't think so, it's a desktop motherboard (Asus Prime X470-PRO). Pretty sure this is an Unraid thing, pushing UTC+0 to the bios on shutdown.