>Michael G. Schabert wrote:
>> >On the other hand, Macintoshes being built the way they are, I'd never use
>> >one as an NTP server - only as a client. The Mac's clock hardware sucks,
>> >and the system is wired to make clock interrupts the lowest priority
>> >interrupt, which means that unless the OS is *exceedingly* careful about
>> >interrupt lockouts, the system will lose time like a a man losing blood
>> >from his femoral artery.
>>
>> Umm, you're slightly amiss on the Mac's clock structure....I've never ever
>> had to reset time on a Mac running MacOS more than 5 minutes per YEAR! and
>> I've used them since the Mac Plus. My dad's SE just needed its FIRST
>> battery replacement.
>>
>> What you must understand is that the Mac's clock interrupt scheme was
>> written for MacOS and NOTHING else. I must agree that it doesn't meet with
>> un*x's "desires" for a nice clock scheme, but under MacOS, it's flawless. I
>> won't buy a Volkswagen Beetle and complain that its shocks suck just
>> because I can't go Baja'ing with it. It wasn't designed for that, so I
>> shouldn't expect it to be suited for it. We, the NetBSD community, also are
>> using our Macs for things that they were NOT designed for, so we shouldn't
>> expect them to operate the way we'd like them to all the time. It's not
>> Apple's fault that we're hacking the hell outta their machines.
>
>Have you ever left an older Mac up and running for a few weeks without
>rebooting?  If you also add in a lot of disk activity, you'll definitely
>notice some clock lossage.  I seem to remember having my IIci up under
>MacOS for about 3 weeks once during college and I lost several _minutes_
>on the clock time.

I am of the school that runs all computers 24*7*365, so I definitely have
left older computers running for weeks, but I do reboot at least once a
week, on principle. Your RAM table must have looked like swiss cheese
running 3 weeks without a reboot! I constantly install and play with alpha,
beta and developer releases of CDeVs and extensions, which require me to
reboot every now & then (for the install, not the crashes ;-). Also, I used
to change ISP settings fairly often when using 2 ISPs for a couple years.

I'm assuming that the reason that you're asserting that it must be done
without rebooting is that the RTC only re-read on boot. That means that the
RTC is keeping the correct time regardless of any other activity. If that's
true, then it's the OS's fault that it can't keep time, since the computer
itself (RTC) always knows the correct time without any appreciable losses.

Personally, I don't mind that the clock was done that way...it makes sure
that the clock function doesn't slow any other interrupts, but still lets
the computer keep accurate time, given that it's simply "wrong" not to
reboot a computer to clean up its RAM.

I realize that I'm in the minority on this issue, and knew it when I first
wrote, but again, as I said, we're an unauthorized use of the Mac hardware,
so the NetBSD opinion isn't really going to count much in future design
decisions. But...on the bright side, MacOSX will be unix-based, so it may
receive an overhaul anyway (I dunno anything about PPC/G3 implementations).

Nothing like a totally moot conversation that is meaningless since it'll
never accomplish anything ;-)
Mike

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