stable-8 regression: time stands still

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 06:12:27PM +0100, Ruben de Groot wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 12:09:21PM +0100, C. P. Ghost typed:
> > On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Ruben de Groot <mail25 at bzerk.org> wrote:
> > > malenfant# sysctl kern.timecounter
> > > kern.timecounter.tick: 1
> > > kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(-100) HPET(900) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000)
> > > kern.timecounter.hardware: HPET
> > 
> > Just a wild guess... but is HPET really enabled in the BIOS?
> 
> Well, there's no such option in the BIOS. Just checked. It's btw an AMI BIOS.
> I'm totally unfamiliar with timecounter hardware, but after resetting the BIOS to
> factory settings (which I think it allready was, since I only change anything 
> there when there is a real reason) the problem persists.

The BIOS option could be labelled something like "Multimedia Timer" or
"High Prevision Event Timer".  Each mainboard or BIOS manufacturer seems
to have their own naming convention for it, though Wikipedia does shed
some light on the confusion.

> I'm going to get this kern.timecounter sysctl from the system booted with a 7.x livecd 
> this evening. But really, I think this is a regression. Even if this system is the only
> one known to be affected (which I sincerely doubt).

You can force a timecounter choice by setting it in /boot/loader.conf.
I would recommend choosing ACPI-safe on your system to see if that
improves things:

kern.timecounter.hardware=ACPI-safe

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |