RHEL 4 clock runs too fast - like dropping seconds
 

I'm running RHEL4 and recently the system clock has been all out of whack. The time is speeding up like it's dropping a few seconds every minute. This of course has the potential to play havoc with our cron and generally causes me great anxiety. We are working on testing the latest kernel to see if that fixes it, but I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on what to check out that might be causing this oddity outside of that.

This is on a Proliant DL380G4 with Xeon processors.

Specifically, taking a painful 10 minutes of running date every 1 minute shows that it appears to gain 10 seconds for every minute. What seems weird is that after that I stopped for about 5 minutes I ran date again at the top of the minute (based on an external time source) and it was only 7 seconds ahead...so there doesn't really appear to be any rhyme or reason to it.

Thanks.

From here:


* Try a different clock source, e.g. : clocksource=acpi_pm

* Clock sources can be changed at runtime by writing the new clocksource name to the file /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource, but be aware that changing to an unstable/broken clock source can hang the system. Changing tsc or jiffies to acpi_pm should be okay. (The list of available sources is in the file available_clocksource in the same directory.)