The system clock on my gentoo system with a 2.6.7 gentoo patched kernel is updating extremely slow: about 4 real seconds for 1 of its seconds. The hardware clock updates fine, so I don't see what the problem could be. I even rm'ed /etc/adjtime and rebooted, but (obviously) that didn't help. I'm pretty much out of ideas here, so any recommendations are appreciated. thanks, bytecoder

talk to those gentoo kernel people about what they did to screw up your clock.

also check to see if your harddrive has DMA enabled and that you don't have any broken hardware.

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talk to those gentoo kernel people about what they did to screw up your clock.

Heh. Just blame it on the people that patched the kernel :P Either way, I'm pretty sure it was working a few days ago with this exact kernel. Hmm, the more I think about it the more I'm not sure. I don't remember doing much out of the ordinary, other than restarting the clock service (I had adjtime problems). I guess I'll try recompiling the kernel and see if that helps.

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also check to see if your harddrive has DMA enabled and that you don't have any broken hardware.

My harddrive doesn't have dma enabled right now, although I'll have to enable it on my next reboot. I don't think I have broken hardware, since the hardware clock works fine, and also both the hardware clock and the system clock worked fine when I had FreeBSD installed a couple weeks ago.

Search for ntp on the forums.gentoo.org for a work around

A lot of people's clocks run slow whilst compiling, is that when it happens to you? It used to happen to me whilst ripping CDs too.

trying a different kernel might help (emerge mm-sources might be your best bet, or find the latest version of the love sources from the gentoo forums, but only if you want to be really bleeding edge (someone likened it to open heart surgery)), though maybe you don't want to do that

edit: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=124278&highlight=ntp is the thread I was talking about, and there's this one too: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=41099&highlight=ntp

maybe not what you'd call proper solutions, but the best I can offer...

There's a program (I forget what its called, I never needed it) for if your clock is also consistently slow at the same speed, to run a cron job which updates your clock at a regular speed. That's a really unusual speed difference, though. Also, I seem to remeber there being an option somewhere deep in the kernel settings to use the hardware clock or something all the time (not sure).

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Search for ntp on the forums.gentoo.org for a work around

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There's a program (I forget what its called, I never needed it) for if your clock is also consistently slow at the same speed, to run a cron job which updates your clock at a regular speed. That's a really unusual speed difference, though.

Those are both work arounds, which are ok, but I want to find out what's causing it and fix it.

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Also, I seem to remeber there being an option somewhere deep in the kernel settings to use the hardware clock or something all the time (not sure).

That sounds interesting, but wouldn't that incur a small speed hit? It takes me a few seconds to even retrieve the current time from the hardware clock using hwclock --show.
Well, I'm gonna try recompiling my kernel and see if that helps.

EDIT:
Recompiling the kernel didn't work, so I tried reconfiguring it, which also didn't work. I'm emerging the vanilla sources now to see if they work, and if they don't I guess I'll try reverting back to the 2.6.6 sources.

Thanks for all your help, bytecoder

[Edited by - bytecoder on July 25, 2004 7:43:42 PM]