Something Wicked (with my hdwr clock) This Way Comes

[Dean S. Messing]

Tom Horsley worte:
: On Thu, 27 Dec 2007 15:18:23 -0800 (PST)
: "Dean S. Messing" <deanm at sharplabs.com> wrote:
: 
: > I'm not sure what any this means. "hpet" is the "high precision timer"
: > and the
: > 
: > hpet_resources: 0xfed00000 is busy
: 
: HPET huh? I am absolutely ignorant of the issues on this, but
: I'm pretty sure I remember much cursing coming from the linux
: kernel guys at work over HPETs. You might want to see if you
: can find a linux kernel mailing list archive you can search
: on the topic of HPET, perhaps something useful will crop up
: (though every time I try to search lkml all I get is 100000
: or so hits in the bodies of patches which contain no useful
: text - someday I need to figure out if google can be induced
: to ignore hits from inside things that look like context diffs).

That was my experience last evening when I was looking for an answer.
Lot's of useless hits.  A few old posts (c. 2002) with what appeared
to be my symptoms, a few newer.  But no solutions.

What I'm trying to determine is, is this a problem with my system,
alone, or it it due to a kernel bug in combo with it.

I'd be interested to see if anyone else on the list running

F7_x86_64 and using the 2.6.23.8-34.fc7 kernel

 is seeing `hwclock --show' hang.

Ok, something's going on here.

I just (as root) tried it twice in a row and:

[root at medulla ~]# hwclock --show
Thu 27 Dec 2007 12:55:36 AM PST  -4.135175 seconds
[root at medulla ~]# hwclock --show
Timed out waiting for time change.

The first one took about 4 seconds to return by the bye.
The second one took much longer, maybe 50 seconds.
My CPU (on this quad CPU system) usage also shot up.  
During that time the entire system became sluggish.

I currently have three parallel jigdo downloads running.
But they are eating almost no CPU of themselves.
I wonder if they might be involved.

Just killed them.

Nope.  Made no difference. The command still hangs.

Arrrg!

Dean