Ever since I got a few Lucent Orinoco wlan cards I have noticed my machines
having problems keeping time.  I have at least 11 machines running NetBSD,
three of which have Orinoco cards.  The three with Orinocos can't keep
their clocks synced to my time server, the other eight machines are having
no problems at all.

On the machines with Orinoco, I'm getting this in syslog:

Feb 16 22:04:03 lintu ntpd[1818]: time reset 5.195761 s
Feb 16 22:24:28 lintu ntpd[1818]: time reset 4.644074 s
Feb 16 22:44:55 lintu ntpd[1818]: time reset 4.098320 s
Feb 16 23:05:33 lintu ntpd[1818]: time reset 5.314190 s
Feb 16 23:26:12 lintu ntpd[1818]: time reset 4.562015 s
Feb 16 23:47:49 lintu ntpd[1818]: time reset 4.644067 s

and

Feb 16 21:08:50 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 13.217707 s
Feb 16 21:33:56 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 15.851273 s
Feb 16 21:57:43 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 15.032272 s
Feb 16 22:20:30 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 14.816318 s
Feb 16 22:44:23 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 15.178172 s
Feb 16 23:05:03 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 13.908488 s
Feb 16 23:30:00 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 15.441712 s
Feb 16 23:51:54 pulla ntpd[200]: time reset 14.515765 s

It doesn't seem to matter whether the machine is idle or not.

The problem has been there for several months, at least, and it's still
there with the 15ZA kernel built from sources one week old.

I can't easily test these machines without the Orinoco, but it's the
only thing they have in common.  One is a 150 MHz laptop, one a 166 MHz
router, and the third a 700 MHz Thunderbird (with 256 MB RAM).

On the laptop, I also have audio problems: Every now and then, there's
a short pause in audio playback.  So far, it seems that the mouse pointer
in X freezes for approximately the same period of time.  If these things
are related, maybe the Orinoco driver is blocking the timer interrupt for
a while which affects real time and stops all processes for a while?

Has anyone else noticed symptoms like this?

  -jm