[BUG] Clock always faster

[Lamont R. Peterson]

On Friday 05 May 2006 08:24am, Joe Desbonnet wrote:
> If a clock is found to be running predictibly fast or slow is it
> possible to correct that somehow?

Run ntpd.  That will keep the system clock in sync.

It could be a bug in the BIOS.  I recently dealt with some AMD64 X2 boxes 
(from Alienware) that had a really big issue similar to this because of the 
way the BIOS was configuring (or not properly configuring) the APIC.  If we 
ran an SMP kernel on those boxes under those conditions, the delay loop was 
seriously miscalibrated and we would see the clock stall & jump.  It also 
made it extremely difficult to type as the briefest of touches to a key would 
cause anywhere from 2-20 keypresses to register, even after we had turned the 
keyboard repeat rates all the way down.

Running a uniprocessor kernel cured all our woes.  A little more testing 
pointed towards the APIC config, but the BIOS those boxes had didn't give us 
enough control to be 100% certain about that.  Unfortunately, we were running 
in an isolated environment, so we couldn't check for nor try to pick up an 
updated BIOS for those boxes.

[snip]
-- 
Lamont R. Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: F98C E31A 5C4C 834A BCAB  8CB3 F980 6C97 DC0D D409
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