Terrible Clock Skew

[Dave Cundiff]

Hi everyone,

I posted this to the forum as well but figured I'd try here since the
same people might not subscribe to both.

I've been experiencing some terrible clock skew and just can't figure
it out. By terrible I mean I'm losing 30 minutes a day. The loss only
occurs when I bring the system under heavy load. The load is multiple
Rsync backups to a ZFS pool(with gzip compression) backed by a 16 disk
Raid50. I'm using a hardware Raid controller for battery backed write
caching.

Mobo: Supermicro X8DTL
CPU: Dual Intel 5620 quad cores
Raid: Areca 1620

I have ntp enabled but the skew happens to fast and it stops trying.
I've tried a bunch of stuff from the various lists. I tried all my
clock sources. TSC(-100) HPET(900) ACPI-fast(1000) i8254(0). I tried
changing the kern.hz flag lower. I also tried disabling the enhanced
speed step feature of this chip as per the FAQ on the site. Nothing
works.

Currently I'm defaults except the following settings.

EIST Disabled in BIOS
kern.hz="100"
kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254

Is there anything else I could do to debug this? I can't really blame
the hardware because I have these same boards/chips running in Linux
with no clock issues.

-- 
Dave Cundiff
System Administrator
A2Hosting, Inc
http://www.a2hosting.com