alternate system clock has died

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Stijn Hoop wrote:

> I'm getting the message in the subject when I run systat -vm on a
> lightly loaded server. Top shows interesting CPU usage %: 
> 
> CPU states:  0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0%
> idle
> 
> Some Googling tells me that a fix for this went in around 1998 in
> sys/i386/isa/clock.c, see
> 
> http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/159/1998/7/0/777198/
> 
> (fix verified to be present in RELENG_4_8 which is what the machine is
> running). 
> 
> Since I'm the only one with this problem I'm assuming some hardware
> clock has died, but now I'm trying to find out which one exactly. Could
> this have to do with the battery-backed CMOS clock? If so how can I know
> for sure that that isn't working right? 
> 
> More information available on request. 

Many vendors have hardware diagnostic CD's available on their web sites
that test various aspects of the system, such as the accuracy of the
clock, the proper functioning of timers, etc.  You might want to give one
a spin.  Also, if you have any identical (or very similar hardware) that
does or does not exhibit the problem, that would be interesting also.

Speaking of systat -vmstat, in the interrupts column, what is the
interrupt count for the rtc and clk lines?

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories