NTP on amd74 + powernow issues

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 05:24:07PM +0200, Guido van Rooij wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 03:58:03AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 11:13:49AM +0200, Guido van Rooij wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 08:42:38PM +0100, David Malone wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 07:46:05PM +0200, Guido van Rooij wrote:
> > > > > I've got a amd64 system where I;m using powernow. I am using th i8254
> > > > > timecounter. I keep getting time resets from ntp:
> > > > 
> > > > I don't think the i8254 should be effected by the i8254. Are there
> > > > any other choices listed under kern.timecounter.choice? I have one
> > > > amd64 machine running powerd to control the powernow stuff and it
> > > > works OK with the ACPI timer.
> > > 
> > > Nope:
> > > kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000)
> > > 
> > > IIRC I couldn't boot at all with acpi, so I disabled it.
> > 
> > ACPI-fast should address the problem you're seeing with NTP drift.
> > 
> > It would then be best to figure out why your machine won't boot with
> > ACPI enabled.
> 
> This lead to a panic as is described here:
> http://bsd.haofood.net/2005/11/21/work-around-for-busted-rs-acpi-long/
> 
> The panic occurs because a \0 is in the namespace. It was suggested
> to fix the problem by overwriting \0 with X or _ when loading the 
> acpi tables.
> 
> This has not been fixed and there is no bios update for the motherboard...

Ouch.  Seems MSI should really be addressing this with a BIOS update,
but I don't know of any technical contacts at MSI who could help with
this.

I realise it's probably in violation of the ACPI spec (re: MSI's fault),
but other OSes probably have similar workarounds.

Nate and/or John, is there any chance of getting a patch in for this,
epsecially since it was reported over 2 years ago?

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |