At 1:48 PM -0800 1/4/00, Paul Sander wrote:
>donlee_68k@icompute.com wrote:
>>	2. Why does the clock behave so badly?  If this is a known
>>	problem in 1.4.1, will it be fixed in the (soon to be releaed??)
>>	1.4.2?
>
>There's some mention in the install notes that the interrupt structure
>of the Mac somehow interferes with the time-of-day clock, and that running
>I/O-bound processes will cause the clock to lose several minutes each
>hour.
>
>Apparently there's something inherent in the way that NetBSD interacts with
>the Mac hardware to cause this, but it's probably fixable; Apple A/UX did
>not exhibit this problem.  As for how easy such a fix will be can only be
>ascertained by the NetBSD kernel architects, though.

A/UX "fixed" it by having an alternate interrupt structure built into
certain models.  If you ran A/UX on a machine that didn't have the
modification then A/UX would have the same problem, guaranteed.  Someone
was looking into using the alternate interrupt priorities, but the problem
is that it changes an awful lot of low level stuff to use it.

MacBSD runs on machines, like the 840av, that A/UX was never ported to, so
we *have* to support the MacOS interrupt priorities.  That said I've heard
that Scott Reynolds has been gradually moving things around to deal with
the problem, and that the problem is much less in 1.4 than in earlier
versions.

As a workaround I can't use NTP, but ntpdate in a cron job works just fine.

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