misc/166549: Clock stops ticking in some cases with new timer framework in 9

[Joe Holden]

>Number:         166549
>Category:       misc
>Synopsis:       Clock stops ticking in some cases with new timer framework in 9
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sun Apr 01 02:00:24 UTC 2012
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Joe Holden
>Release:        9.0-RELEASE
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD grace 9.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE #0: Sun Feb 26 07:38:43 GMT 2012     root at grace:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GRACE  i386
>Description:
On a handful of machines I have had issues where the clock stops ticking, it's hard to judge when they stopped ticking as services don't seem to stop running, they just don't know the time has advanced which also obviously makes the output of 'date' static...

Setting kern.eventtimer.periodic=1 "fixes" the problem and resumes the ticking.

Seen on a variety of machines/virtual machines - ICH7/Celeron & VirtualBox, both 32 and 64bit
>How-To-Repeat:
Boot machine, wait for it to stop ticking :)
>Fix:
n/a

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: