TS-7200: time sync issues

[Ken Hornstein <kenh%cmf.nrl.navy.mil@localhost>]

This has been bugging me for a while now, and I thought I'd finally say
something about it.

On my TS-7200, ntpd has some issues synchronizing the clock.
Specifically, when ntpd starts up, it finds the time servers normally
and does the initial time step to get the clock close enough.  But
after that time step occurs, the clock is off by a variable amount;
sometimes it's close to a second, but a lot of the time it's around
a quarter of a second.  E.g:

Dec  7 20:28:57 modred ntpd[302]: frequency initialized 0.000 PPM from 
/var/db/ntp.drift
Dec  7 20:30:30 modred ntpd[302]: time reset -2.381602 s
Dec  7 20:30:30 modred ntpd[302]: kernel time sync status change 0001
Dec  7 20:46:32 modred ntpd[302]: time reset +0.906469 s
Dec  7 21:02:04 modred ntpd[302]: time reset +0.573713 s
Dec  7 21:18:06 modred ntpd[302]: time reset +0.201409 s
Dec  7 21:33:12 modred ntpd[302]: time reset +0.198393 s

Eventually what will happen is that ntpd will get "lucky" and get the time
within the 128 ms slew threshold, and then ntpd will function normally.
I've been trying to figure out what's going on here, but I've had little
luck.  Does anyone have any ideas?  Or even an idea of where to start?

--Ken