[ntp:questions] Losing clock ticks (Was: Severe time drift for Undisciplined Local Clock)

Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Thu Apr 12 07:37:38 UTC 2007


David,

David Woolley wrote:
[...]
> (Linux is OK for a dedicated server, although it can lose clock
> ticks if it is doing other things that require disk I/O.)

I don't know why this is posted continuously here.

Of course there may have been Linux kernel versions which came with certain
drivers which caused the kernel to lose clock ticks. However, this is not a
generic Linux Problem. 

In the past I've also seen other operating systems which came with drivers
which had interrupts disabled for too long. In most cases it was due to IDE
disk drivers which had been improperly implemented. There have always been
updated versions of those drivers which fixed those problems. 

We all know that bugs can be introduced if a piece of software continues to
be developed, this is even the case with ntpd ;-)

I'm running ntpd on a bunch of Linux machines with different kernel versions
without such problems. 

Maybe the fact that problems are more often reported under Linux is just due
to the fact (I guess) there are much more installations of Linux rather
than FreeBSD.

Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Meinberg Funkuhren
Bad Pyrmont
Germany




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