On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Allen Briggs wrote:

> >  How does MacOS keep the clock accurate, with heavy interrupt lossage 
> > with things like floppy too ?
> 
> I don't know.  They might just read it from the RTC on a regular basis...
> Anyone have any ideas?

I think there's a section that reads off the RTC immediately after floppy
usage.  Don't know about serial port usage, though.  I know my system slows
to a crawl when I'm downloading by modem, but then my clock under MacOS has
been drifting a little... (not the PowerMac, the PoweBook).

If I understand this thread correctly, xntpd must be reading time off a
time server, right?  And if it's not configured for a time server it doesn't
do anything, right?  How about patch its code so that every four seconds,
if it doesn't know how to find (or for some reason is unable to access a 
timeserver, it will update off of the real time clock and then go ahead and
then let it set the PRAM time whenever it wants to....  It can't lose _too_ 
much time that way, can it?

Just a possibility,

 /---------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David A. Gatwood             And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  |
|davagatw@mars              Went home and put a bullet through his head.|
|dgatwood@nyx.cs.du.edu              --Edwin Arlington Robinson         |
|http://mars.utm.edu/~davagatw -or- http://nox.cs.du.edu:8001/~dgatwood |
 \---------------------------------------------------------------------/