Hardware clock synchronization conflicts in dual-boot environments

Arch Linux follows the standard convention of maintaining the hardware time clock (RTC) in UTC. This configuration is managed via timedatectl, but conflicts frequently arise when the system dual-boots with Windows, which typically expects the RTC to be set to local time.

While timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 allows the kernel to interpret the hardware clock as local time, this setting can lead to time jumps during suspend cycles or when switching between operating systems. There is no native mechanism within the Arch installation to force Windows to adopt a UTC-based RTC without manual registry modifications in the guest environment.

Does the set-local-rtc flag persist across reboots if systemd-timesyncd is active? What is the recommended approach for ensuring consistent time offsets across different kernels when the hardware clock cannot be unified to UTC by the OS-level configuration?