[ntp:questions] ntp-4.2.6p5 on Win 7 x64

Rob nomail at example.com
Mon Jul 21 14:55:09 UTC 2014


Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de> wrote:
> Except what I've mentioned before I have had rare cases where the 
> Windows timekeeping was generally broken due to some drivers.
>
> If I remember correctly then one case was a hard disk driver, and a some 
> latency checker program was used to show that the driver had blocked 
> IRQs for too long, so the timekeeping was strongly degraded.

There have been early IDE disks, 20 years ago, that required the entire
transfer of a block to occur without interruption.  The drivers for those
disks disabled interrupts during the transfer.
This happened on Linux as well.  You could set a flag not to do this,
on your own risk, and you would start to see corrupted blocks.

Of course, later the disk transfers happened under DMA and probably
the braindead disk firmware was fixed as well.



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