Runaway clock

[Jaglover]

I trying to figure out why NTP can't keep correct time. As you can see I'm switching between clocksources and restarting openntp but it does not make any difference. What am I missing here? I have three clocksources available: tsc, hpet, acpi_pm, switching between them makes no difference.

[wcg]

Does it ever actually make the adjustment, or is it simply
reporting approximately the same clock error that it
detected the first time it ran?

What happens if you stop ntpd and run some kind of
command line ntp client with a verbose option, connecting
to [your country code].pool.ntp.org?

(Does it succeed or does it report an error?)
_________________
TIA

[Jaglover]

Thanks for reply
Below you can see after I ran ntpdate it started drifting away (slowly but surely) again. I have to admit I do not understand openntpd messages. I think when it's printing 'adjusting' then it actually is an attempt to adjust, no telling wheter it was successful or not.

[wcg]

That is a steady and persistent clock drift, but at least
you know the clock works and the adjtime() function
works. Could be the clock chip, could be the power supply,
could be software, but that particular software in the kernel
gets tested fairly thoroughly. You can try a different
power supply and run nptdate again to see if that
mitigates the clock drift any.

Otherwise, I suggest that you simply have to live with
frequent adjustments larger than you would like. I use
openrdate from cron, and one system would have
huge clock drift whenever the power supply was unplugged
from the motherboard, despite a new CMOS battery.
I had to lose the "-a" ("adjust in small increments") option
to openrdate and simply let it jump to the correct time
whenever I restarted it after unplugging the power supply
to install some different peripheral hardware or dram.
_________________
TIA

[your_WooDness]

Hey,

had a similar problem with an AMD based server and an CentOS where the clock had to resync very often. For me it fixed the problem by appending "disable_timer_pin_1" to the kernel in grub.

w00d