Hi. I have a computer based on a Tyan Tiger i7501 motherboard, which
hosts two 2GHz Xeons with Hyperthreading. ntpd won't sync on it. I've
tried changing the kern.timecounter.hardware from ACPI-Fast (the
default) to TSC and i8254.
It appears to work marginally better when set to i8254, but it still
doesn't sync. The jitter figure from "ntpq -p" seems to stabilize in
the mid 50s, when kern.timecounter.hardware is set to ACPI-Fast. The
synch distance figure from "ntptrace" seems to grow without bound.
Anyone have any ideas? I'd be happy to provide any further information
necessary. This machine is my file server, and I would really like for
it to have its clock run accurately.
How many NTP servers do you have configured? I scratched my head
a long time for a similar issue a while back, and if I recall
correctly, ntpd now really, *really*, wants 3 (?) or more NTP
servers before disciplining the local clock.