soekris box still keeps terrible time

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 02:17:54PM -0500, James K. Lowden
wrote:

> I upgraded my Soekris 4801 to NetBSD 3.1.  Using the
GENERIC kernel, it
> still keeps awful time.  I reset the time at 1:00 PM
today, and already
> (at 2:00) it thinks it's 3:47 PM.  
> 
> I had been told by a reliable source this is fixed?  

i have the same problem with my soekris. it does not seem to
have
a very precise crystal but i'm not sure about it. i was a
bit
surprised of the low quality. i get the same message about
the broken
tsc.

my last time resets are :

Nov  9 19:33:47 gilb ntpd[12848]: time reset -0.154230 s
Nov 10 17:48:14 gilb ntpd[12848]: time reset -0.170161 s

and i get plenty of tolerance exceed stuff :

Nov 12 02:54:51 gilb ntpd[12848]: time reset +0.340310 s
Nov 12 03:00:16 gilb ntpd[12848]: frequency error -512 PPM
exceeds tolerance 500 PPM
Nov 12 03:17:31 gilb ntpd[12848]: time reset +0.258727 s
Nov 12 03:22:53 gilb ntpd[12848]: frequency error 512 PPM
exceeds tolerance 500 PPM
Nov 13 14:03:58 gilb ntpd[12848]: time reset -0.179926 s

sometimes it spends hours and hours working and then it
sends me series
of ppm tolerance stuff.

i have not yet tried the TIMER_FREQ thing.

-- 
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck
; more ;
yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep

>i have the same problem with my soekris. it does not
seem to have
>a very precise crystal but i'm not sure about it. i was
a bit
>surprised of the low quality. i get the same message
about the broken
>tsc.

Hm, I missed the detail where they were talking about the
4801, which
uses a different processor than the 4501.  The issue with
the 4501 processor
(the SC520) is that the timer that is used by the clock runs
at a different
frequency than normal, so you need to adjust it.  But ...
the behavior you're
getting is the same that I saw before I adjusted the kernel
with TIMER_FREQ,
so maybe I'm reading the datasheet wrong and the 4801 _does_
have the
same issue; but anyway, it's worth a shot trying it out, I
think.

--Ken