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Re: severely bad timekeeping



Hi,

The machine started life as a 7600/132 - for example, that's what's
printed on the case - but (I'm told) it's got a G3 upgrade in it.
dmesg.boot describes the CPU thus (I am not comptent to say whether
this means it really is a G3 or not, which is why I put it that way):

cpu0 at mainbus0: 750 (Revision 2.2), ID 0 (primary)
cpu0: HID0 8090c0a4<EMCP,DOZE,DPM,ICE,DCE,SGE,BTIC,BHT>, powersave: 1
cpu0: 305.89 MHz L2 cache present but not enabled

You can find out more about your CPU card from this page:

http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/g3card.shtml

The time it keeps is wrong by almost a percent - it runs approximately
half a second per minute slow.  ntp fails to sync under these
circumstances (yes, I did check for an old ntp.drift file; this is
being tested after destroying ntp.drift).  Killing ntpd and running
ntpdate -b once a minute produces matching results (a correction of
about .48 seconds each time around).

Any ideas?  I can provide more details, if you can tell me where to
find them....

I would have to guess that your machine is anomalous. I have several 7300 - 7600 type machines, 4400, Performa 6400, 9600, first generation iMac, various G4 towers, with a variety of accelerator types, and I've never seen any time drift issues. My Motorola StarMax (4400 type) even runs as a stratum 1 timeserver with no problems:

john% ntpq -p grittykitty.ziaspace.com
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
*GPS_NMEA(0)     .GPS.            0 l   55   64  377    0.000    0.008   0.008
-clock.isc.org   .GPS.            1 u  933 1024  377   17.506   -7.149   0.015
+clock.sjc.he.ne .CDMA.           1 u   26 1024  377   18.115    0.965   0.057
+clock.via.net   .GPS.            1 u  947 1024  377   16.607    0.345   0.289

You might just have to fudge your ntpd config.

John


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