[ntp:questions] drift value very large and very unstable

[Miroslav Lichvar]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 09:13:14AM -0600, Andy Helten wrote:
> As I mentioned in a previous email, I was going to run ntp while adding
> back in some of the features I removed.  After doing this, at least
> superficially, I've isolated the problem to time step being disabled. 
> It doesn't matter whether I specify 'tinker step 0' in ntp.conf or use
> the '-x' argument on the command line.

This looks like a kernel bug. When the step threshold is 0 or larger
than 0.5s, kernel time discipline is disabled and time is adjusted
only by adjtime(). I've recently seen a similar problem on a PowerPC
machine where adjtime() called with delta smaller than 1ms was
ignored.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar