Independent host and container system time

We have an embedded Linux system where we are merging two unique systems. One of the systems we have placed into an LXC container (v2.0.8). The applications on these systems manage time in very different ways. The host system uses local time as its system clock. It has no understanding of time zones. The container-based system has been built to use UTC as the system time.

Is there a way to mange time independently between the host and container? From what I have read, LXC does not natively support this. Has anyone used timekeeper: http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~caesar/papers/timekeeper-pads14.pdf

Thanks,
Kyle Jordan

There has been occasional discussions of implementing a time namespace in the kernel which would effectively work as an offset from kernel time. But I’m not aware of anyone actually writing that code and the current upstream kernel doesn’t have anything like that.

So you’d either need a custom kernel with added code to implement that feature or you may be able to do some of that through LD_PRELOAD tricks in userspace.