clock issues

syamajala · 2005-09-10 12:05:46

Ok, i saw that someone was having clock issues sometime ago, and dibblethewrecker said to look at hwclock. I looked and i found that hwclock shows the right time, but date does not. When the set the time with ntpdate, with in 2 minutes it starts to drift. If i check it in a couple of hours it will be like 3 or 4 hours off. If i check the next day, it will be a day ahead. But all the while hwclock shows the correct time. I tried replacing the battery on the mobo, but still have this problem. Any ideas?

elasticdog · 2005-09-10 17:02:21

Are you running an Nforce2 motherboard? If so, many people are experiencing severe drifts such as this, and it may be solveable...try disabling the BIOS options FSB Spread Spectrum and the AGP Spread Spectrum.

Both of these BIOS options are designed to help reduce EMI emmission spikes made by the motherboard (at the cost of a minor decrease in stability). They do this by slightly modulating the signals generated in order to spread out the radiated energy across numerous bands of the spectrum. Unless you're experiencing abnormal EMI problems or have sensitive data that must be safeguarded from electronic eavesdropping, it should be completely safe to disable these options.

So if you're using an Nforce2, give that a shot, and you may get a slight perfomance boost out of it as well! Also, installing NTP to automatically keep an eye on things can be helpful...I'm working on cleaning up the wiki entry on NTP, but it's not too hard to setup.

syamajala · 2005-09-11 02:05:49

The systems that are drifting are all running ntp and use the ati express 200 chipset. My main dev box is a nforce3 but does not have any problems. I'll look at that though, but they probably won't have the agp speard sepctrum option because they have built in video cards. There is also 1 pci express lot on each motherboard, but it is not being used.

elasticdog · 2005-09-11 03:20:52

Not sure what else to suggest matey, those are some pretty severe drifts...so are you experiencing the same thing on two separate machines, both with the ATI Express 200 chipset? Perhaps someone else has some ideas for ya...

syamajala · 2005-09-11 11:43:09

3 systems. but hwclock shows the correct time on all 3. date keeps showing the wrong thing.

lanrat · 2005-09-11 15:17:21

Try searching gentoo forums. There are many posts about similar problems with kernel time drifting.

Also you can try adjtimex tool:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=12347
There are some links to gentoo forums in this thread too.

Ntpd or openntpd will not fix time and date if the drift is too large and growing.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-09-10 12:05:46

clock issues

#2 2005-09-10 17:02:21

Re: clock issues

#3 2005-09-11 02:05:49

Re: clock issues

#4 2005-09-11 03:20:52

Re: clock issues

#5 2005-09-11 11:43:09

Re: clock issues

#6 2005-09-11 15:17:21

Re: clock issues

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