[COLUG] Linux Clock Skew Fix

[William Yang]

Travis Sidelinger wrote:
> What distro and version of that distro are you using?
> 
> Joshua Kramer wrote:
>> If I recall correctly, there was discussion on this list a while back
>> about people's clocks running too fast under various Linux distros and
>> architectures, and the first thing to check was bulging capacitors.
>>
>> Microsoft has issued a fix for this:
>>
>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918461
>>
>> I tried this on my system, and I can now happily report that my three
>> linux boxen, all of which had sloppy clocks, now keep time on the dot!

While I can't speak to Josh's systems, I've had similar problems on a 
Gentoo Linux box running 2.6.18 on AMD Sempron hardware.  I put the 
following comments in my grub.conf file on that box.  My clock was moving 
significantly faster than 1 system second per real world second (1.5 to 2 
sys per real).

# kernel arguments
#
# this hardware has clock issues.  These are experimentation notes
# regarding a double-speed clock on sempron boxes
#
# enable_timer_pin_1            # double clock speed
# noapic nolapic                # breaks network (irq10 disabled)
# noapictimer                   # breaks network (irq10 disabled)
# noapic acpi=noirq             # net works, clock seems right
# noapictimer irqpoll           # net works, clock seems right
# noapic acpi=off               # net works, clock seems right
# noapic acpi=noirq nolapic     # net works, clock seems right

Just for kicks and giggles, though, I rebooted the box with the clock=pit 
argument to see what would happen.  In the fist 10 minutes of testing, this 
seemed to also be adequate to resolve the clock problem....

	-Bill
-- 
William Yang
wyang at gcfn.net