Dell Latitude D600, Gentoo, System Clock Skew

b1f30 · 02-05-2009, 08:58 AM

All - most curious problem. I have a workhorse little D600 w/Gentoo, and the system clock skews hours ahead of the hwclock. The hwclock always seems to be right, but system clock will drift anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours away from the hwclock.

Any tweaks/tips to fix this?

Did a Google search, but only came up with hwclock incompatibilities, not clock drifting from hwclock.

Also, I'm running both ntpdate-client and ntpd, which in theory *should* be keeping my system in check, but alas - no dice.

strick1226 · 02-05-2009, 09:15 AM

That's a bugger. I've run into clock skew issues within VM's on machines with CPU power-saving modes enabled (Intel SpeedStep, AMD Cool 'n Quiet etc.), but not a situation that affected the main clock of the system itself.

Just to see if it makes a difference... could you try disabling Speedstep in the Latitude BIOS for a bit to see if that fixes it? Might be worth a shot.

b1f30 · 02-05-2009, 09:27 AM

I was thinking the Speedstep might throw it off a bit, but odd because if I use say, Debian on the little booger, it seems to do ok. Hrm.

Nonetheless, it's worth a shot. I was following the Gentoo 'How to ACPI your laptop' documentation and I also built the CPU_FREQ stuff into the kernel. Who knows - maybe that's actually causing more harm than good.

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a shot!

elliott678 · 02-06-2009, 09:47 AM

My C600 did that, I didn't bother figuring out why, I just did a quick and dirty fix. I put "hwclock --hctosys" into my hourly cron jobs.