hwclock can cause system lockup

[Chris]

First of all, thanks for all the replies. Some useful suggestions in there
which I'll be trying this morning.

2008/10/17 Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com>

> runs "/sbin/hwclock --utc --hctosys" to sync the hardware clock to
> the system clock.
>
> But this is syncing the system clock to the hardware clock, not the
> hardware clock to the system clock. This has me confused as to what
>

Sorry, my mistake. I meant to say "to sync the system clock to the hardware
clock". As Todd Denniston pointed out, the hardware clock can be
significantly more accurate than the system clock. Our application requires
accurate time but some users are not net-connected so can't use NTP. If NTP
is in use we sync the hardware clock to the system clock once per hour. If
NTP is NOT in use, we sync the system clock to the hardware clock once per
hour.

The reason to sync the hardware clock to the system clock when using NTP is
to ensure that the difference never gets too great, so if there is a power
outage or unclean shutdown, the hardware clock is reasonably accurate when
it comes back up.

We always used to do this on our old RedHat 7.3 based systems without
problem. We recently updated to F9 and this issue appeared so maybe some
kernel changes have brought the issue to light.

I've checked /var/log/messages and root mail but there's nothing of any
interest in there.

I just tried running the script at runlevel 3 with the sync occurring every
1 second. It failed after 461 syncs but there was no output of any interest,
just a hung screen.

I'll try some of the other suggestions a bit later.

Thanks again...
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