Subject: Re: system clock
To: Daniel Bell <dbell@hops.cs.jhu.edu>
From: Christopher R. Bowman <crb@Glue.umd.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 04/08/1996 19:01:48
On Mon, 8 Apr 1996, Daniel Bell wrote:

> Both of the machines on which I run macbsd (both IIcx's) show an inability to 
> keep time accurately. This is a problem both under netbsd and macos. I have
> always suspected a dead battery, which if I'm not mistaken, lives on the 
> motherboard. Anyone out there know what I'm talking about, or have a similar
> problem? 

Yes in fact I hvae lost so much time that 2 am cron jobs are now occuring
mid-afternoon, but I always thought that this was a result of the clock
interupt haveing lower priority than the disk interupt on the mac
systems, and thus when interupts are shutout to handle disk io
clock interupts got lost.  This should not, however, cause the clock
to slip under mac os.  On the other hand if your kernel was updateing the
rtc chip on exit, then accumulated unix time errors would bhe present under
the macos.  It was might impression that some kernels didn't update the 
rtc for just this reason though I must confess that I don't know the
exact situation with regards to this.

---------
Christopher R. Bowman
crb@eng.umd.edu
My home page