FreeBSD clock problem

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 @ 19:47:49 UT
added by Edoardo in clock compaq presario 1694 freebsd laptosauro

A few days after I installed FreeBSD 7.1 BETA, with lots of help from ferz on my old and trustworthy laptop, I noticed a problem with the clock.

The time was running too fast!

I was debugging something in cron because it wasn't executed, and while having a look at the time in top, I noticed that the seconds were incremented the double at each refresh.

I asked around, then I remembered gq was working with some BSD distros, so I sent him an e-mail explaining my problem, and in a few hours it was fixed! :)

These were the steps:

1) run sysctl and find out the relevant information about the kernel clock source:
> sysctl -a | grep kern.timecounter.choice

My output is:
kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000)

2) try to change the value of kern.timecounter.hardware using the ones listed by the previous command, with
> sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=[new value]
(ie. > sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254) and check if the clock works correctly after that.
If yes, good, problem solved :)
If no try with the other possible values.

What worked for me was i8254.

3) read some relevant information and learn how to make the changes permanent.

4) profit!

Many thanks to ferz and gq for all the help!

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1 comment

  1. Sun, 18 Jan 2009 @ 23:58:25 UT
    posted by Richard Verwayen from Germany

    I was shocked when I saw the clock running that fast on my nc4000. But now it works like a charme!

    Richard

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