Quoting Ugo Bellavance <ugob at camo-route.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I have a dual core athlon server and it is gaining 1 day every 2 days
> w/o time sync. Even with ntpd running, the time is not under control.
> I must put a very frequent cronjob of 'ntpdate' to keep the time
under
> control. This creates big problems since winbind eventually stops
> working so my users can't access their data.
Running under VMware by any chance? If yes read next paragraph, if not
skip to the one after it (but you might still read both).
In current versions of VMware (for example ESX 2.5.x), 2.6 kernels are
not yet officially supported. What you described is one of the
problems with 2.6 kernels and VMware. Add "clock=pit" kernel option
(in grub.conf or lilo.conf, whichever boot loader you use), don't use
NTP to sync time, install vmware-tools onto each guest and enable time
synchronization in them (by default it is off). It should keep time in
your guests under some controll. The problem is mostly because 2.6
kernels are much stricter in watching the frequency source selected for
clock, and they also increased the frequncy of interrupts requested
from it from 100Hz to 1000Hz (one global + one per CPU, or something
like that). This frequency is compile time kernel option (it is hard
coded into the kernel, can't be changed once kernel is compiled).
Furthermore, frequency of interrupts increases with number of processor
cores (so if each of your guests is configured with two virtual CPUs,
it's 3000 interrupts per second per 2.6 guest, compared to only 300 per
2.4 guest). With many guest running on bussy box, VMware might not be
able to generate all needed virtual interrupts for 2.6 guest operating
systems, and you get clock problems you are having. There's a code in
clock code in 2.6 kernel that attempts to correct for missed/skipped
interrupts. However under VMware it tends to overcorrect and your
clock starts gaining time fast, like you described. This is classic
problem you'll encounter with current versions of VMware and guests
running 2.6 kernel. It should be corrected in Vmware ESX 3.x (which
should also have official support for 2.6 kernels).
If you are not running VMware, you might still experiment with clock
option (it selects the frequency source kernel uses to keep track of
time). The default frequency source obviously doesn't work well for
you. Available sources are pit, tsc, cyclone and pmtmr, however not
all are available on all motherboards (you'd need to check what kind of
timers your motherboard has). If specified source is not available
(your motherboard doesn't have that hardware), kernel falls back to pit
(or whatever kernel was patched to use by default). You may also try
hpet=disable kernel option (with or without clock option), which
disables HPET (if present on motherboard) and falls back to real PIT.
Even if not using VMware, you might find this document a good read:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf
It describes timer hardware available in average PCs (PC Timer Hardware
chapter) and describes various clock=xxx options (Timekeeping in
Specific Operating Systems chapter, Linux section).
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