NTP and 2.6 kernels

Romain Kang romain at kzsu.stanford.edu
Tue Jun 1 16:18:21 UTC 2004


After running FC2 for the initial few hours, it became evident to
me that its 2.6 kernel is not keeping time as well as FC1's 2.4
kernels.  I had been running NTP off, using the djb clockspeed hack
to keep time stable to within a few msec per week, but FC2 immediately
began loosing several seconds per hour.  To compensate, I've turned
off clockspeed and reenabled NTP, which has apparently tamed my
time of day clock.  However, the ntp drift file is showing about
-150 ppm where it had previously been closer to -20 ppm.

I understand that the ACPI support does things like adjust various
system clocks and other power saving features, with the second order
effect of reducing the noise from cooling fans.  All in all, I'd
say this is a good thing for me.  However, for people who want to
improve their inherent time-of-day stability, I conjecture that
disabling ACPI/APM features in the BIOS may help.

Romain





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