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Date:      Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:33:03 -0400
From:      Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
To:        Ricardo Santos <jedi2k42004@yahoo.com>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Problem with calcru
Message-ID:  <20040812093303.65daa5ab.wmoran@potentialtech.com>
In-Reply-To: <20040812040556.37870.qmail@web53302.mail.yahoo.com>
References:  <20040812040556.37870.qmail@web53302.mail.yahoo.com>

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Please wrap your lines around 72 characters, see:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-questions/index.html

Ricardo Santos <jedi2k42004@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello!
>  
>     Im new to FreeBSD and there is a problem in my installation that is
> repeating itself very frequently, so, as the own OS tells to do, the
> output of 'uname -a' is:
>  
> FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan 16 22:16:53 GMT 2003
> root@hollin.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC      i386
>  
> And the error message is:
>  
> calcru:negative time of -3140916 usec for pid 504(more)
>  
> Both the PID and the process are not constant, so, i dont know what to
> do... Hope anyone has an idea...

Everything changes so much because this is a hardware problem, thus it
affects just about everything on your system.  There's a FAQ entry on
this, but I just noticed that it's woefully out of date.

First off, 5.0-RELEASE is pretty old and has a number of known problems
with it.  You'll have better luck all around if you install 5.2.1.  It's
possible that this is a bug in 5.0 that's since been fixed, so I would
first install 5.2.1 and see if the problem goes away.

If it doesn't then the problem is hardware related.

The explanation is that your computer hardware actually has multiple
clocks in it.  The kernel has to pick a particular clock for scheduling
the operating the system when it boots up, and the clock it chose on
your system is apparently inaccurate as hell ... to the point that it
actually ticks backwards sometimes.

The trick is to find out what other clocks are available on your
motherboard and tell the kernel to use a different one until you
find one that ticks accurately.

Believe it or not, the FAQ entry for this other problem is pretty much
the same solution you can use to fix yours:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/troubleshoot.html#LAPTOP-CLOCK-SKEW

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com



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