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Date:      Sun, 21 Feb 1999 14:56:40 -0800
From:      "Dan O'Connor" <dan@jgl.reno.nv.us>
To:        "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Q: Timecounter "TSC" and drifting clock and calcru neg time
Message-ID:  <01f501be5ded$7278bc20$0200000a@danco.home>

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Good Sunday, everyone,

I'm running 3.1-STABLE on a Pentium 90 machine.

I have a clock that drifts badly (fast by almost 2 min per hour), although
after some reboots, it drifts just a few seconds per hour. Occasionally
after a reboot, I'll get 'calcru negative time' messages.

I've traced this problem to the following symptom: During boot, the line

    Timecounter "TSC"  frequency xxxxxxxxx Hz

is displayed. The routine that clocks the system seems more like a random
number generator, and I've seen the following values:

90.2 MHz
87.7 MHz
77.5 MHz

At 90.2 MHz, the system clock is pretty accurate.

At 87.7 MHz, the clock runs fast by over 90 seconds per hour.
(And 90MHz / 87.7 MHz * 3600 - 3600 = +94 seconds per hour, imagine that!)

At 77.5 MHz, the 'calcru negative time' errors pop up.

I know that, as reported on this list, the timekeeping code is broken, but
my question is this:

Is there somewhere I can tell the system to use a TSC frequency of 90000000
Hz and have it skip it's internal calibration? I don't envision changing
CPUs too often, so I'm not worried about hardcoding it...

--Dan

**  The thing I like most about Windows 98 is...
**  You can download FreeBSD with it!





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