ntpd struggling to keep up - how to fix?

[Michael Loftis]

--On Thursday, February 11, 2010 10:49 PM +0100 Stefan Krueger 
<stadtkind2 at gmx.de> wrote:


<snip>
>
> PS: I had a spare disk so I tried Linux on the same machine, and
> ntpd is running fine for 2 days without any problems; so I guess it's
> not a hw fault

It is a HW fault.  FreeBSD and Linux are just picking different time 
sources, Linux is guessing right, FreeBSD is guessing wrong. AMD actually 
has pretty widely known issues with this.  I've had problems mostly in 
Solaris/OpenSolaris though, a few with FreeBSD, and only rarely with Linux. 
I don't know the details, just that at least the Opteron HPET apparently 
isn't reliable.