Re: netbsd-7 on Old World hardware

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi,

This is a follow-up on this thread:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2014/12/31/msg002138.html

It seems that this problem doesn't have to do with Old World versus New 
World. I spent a little time thinking about which things are different 
between the two machines, and the Power Mac 9600 is a stratum 1 time 
server so the kernel is compiled with "options PPS_SYNC". When I removed 
that, I still got time strangeness, but not as much. When I completely 
stopped running ntpd, though, the problems went away almost completely. I 
can now get meaningful results from flops, although the precision measured 
is not meaningful.

I then tried running ntpd on the Mac mini and it went from meaningful 
without ntpd to meaningless with:

   Module     Error        RunTime      MFLOPS
                            (usec)
     1     -2.5183e+01      0.0411    340.6702
     2             nan      0.0000         inf
     3     -5.0000e-01      0.0000         inf
     4     -8.6603e-01     -0.0000  -7680000019.3901
     5     -6.9315e-01     -0.0000  -14847999931.9862
     6     -2.5000e-01     -0.0000  -14848000037.4876
     7      5.0020e+02      0.0000  864691128455135232.0000
     8             inf     -0.0000  -15360000038.7803

   Iterations      =          0
   NullTime (usec) =     0.0000
   MFLOPS(1)       =        inf
   MFLOPS(2)       =  3698.7057
   MFLOPS(3)       =  3552.7043
   MFLOPS(4)       = -15530666705.8778


Ideas? Thoughts? This really would be nice to fix for NetBSD 7.

John