Issues with clock skew on GCE

[Prakhar Goel]

Just to close this issue out:

The solution I went with was to switch the kernel timecounter to
ACPI-fast. I ran a check on this* and whatever the drift, it was small
enough for the ntpd process to keep the system clock sync'd (drift
less than 0.001s after a day). As a control, I ran the same test on a
VM using the TSC (default) timecounter and that machine drifted by ~50
seconds every five minutes (!).

Thanks for your help Colin and Bruce.

* Just calling ntpdate every five minutes and logging the results. The
specific command I used was ntpdate -q metadata.google.internal so it
didn't actually update the system clock, just checked the drift
against the Google time-servers.
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Warm Regards
Prakhar Goel