Wierd time changes

[Denis R.]

Hi Mark and list members,

I am experiencing the same problem on my dual PII-450 SP700 Compaq Pro
workstation. After poking around on Google, it is pointing to the FreeBSD
and a i8254 programmable interupt timer. In my case the time is lagging
behind 10 times! What does your:
#time sleep 10
show?
It takes 25 seconds on my SMP workstation to execute a 10 second delay. I
have modified the /etc/sysctl.conf and added:
kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254

ntpd couldn't cope with this problem on my server. I have to run ntpdate
every 10 minutes to set the time to an approximately accepted value :-(.

There used to be a problem on older releases of FreeBSD (4.2 and up)
related to a SMP kernel and clock. Someone posted a hack fix of the:
usr/src/sys/i386/isa/clock.c file. But apparently it has been fixed in
newer releases and does not get mentioned in 5.x.

The most common fix I've heard from people is to recompile the kernel and
exclude the SMP support. But if this is the case, I'd be switching to a
mono CPU support of OpenBSD to run it. One of the reasons I like FreeBSD
is its SMP support.

People, any ideas?

dmesg part:
MPTable: <COMPAQ   Workstation >
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
uname -a:
FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE #0: Sun Jan 11 04:21:45 GMT 2004  
  root at wv1u.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

Thanks and regards!
Denis


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I'm completely baffled by this one. When FreeBSD shuts down/reboots it
changes the system clock. It *always* sets the hours to 20 and changes
the minutes and seconds (but I haven't worked out a pattern for that),
but the date stays the same (see /var/log/messages below) although I
once saw it keep the time and date correct, but set the year back *four*
years(!) but that was when the correct time was 22:mm:ss.