keeping time

John Macallister j.macallister1 at physics.ox.ac.uk
Tue Mar 20 08:05:31 UTC 2007


I've had a system whose time "went crazy" after a while. N.B. It was the
Linux time which went crazy: the BIOS time remained accurate. What
happened was it kept perfect time for several hours and then appeared to
slow down or even come to a standstill time-wise. I tried everything I
could think of in the BIOS and in software. The problem was the same on
Ubuntu, Debian and Scientific Linux - perhaps not surprising as they all
use a common kernel. The hardware itself kept perfect time ( correct to
within a few seconds a month ) but it was the software which appeared to
lose the place: even NTP (and connected to a network with NTP servers)
could not keep it in time.
Fortunately the problem was restricted to a particular model of the IBM
Thinkcentre ( Model 8189-D9G ). The problem occurred only with Linux and
the same hardware is functioning perfectly well under Windows.
There may be problems with other hardware. You can easily check out the
time-keeping of your hardware by running it with the BIOS screen and
time display showing, having set it to the correct time of course.
I hope my experience will help others to avoid wasting too much time on
a problem which is a bug in the Linux software.

Cheers,

 John



Name: John B. Macallister  E-mail: j.macallister1 at physics.ox.ac.uk
Post: Clarendon Laboratory, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK
Phone: +44-1865-273388 (direct)  272200 (reception)  272400 (Fax)

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[mailto:ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Mikus
Grinbergs
Sent: 20 March 2007 00:08
To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: keeping time

I have an Ubuntu 6.10 system running 24/7 which gains more than two
hours every week.

For the purposes of this discussion, assume that the system has *no*
external inputs -- only me at the console -- no network connection of
any kind.

What can I set_up / tweak so that the time being kept by the system is
more accurate ?


Thanks,  mikus


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