[Voyage-linux] NTP: important drift in time

[Jeff Dairiki]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 09:37:56AM +0000, Stephane Acounis wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to synchronize the Alix3c2 clock to a NTP server
> 
> Each time I type the "ntpq -p" command, I see the offset growing:
> 
> So, is there a bug in the RTC driver? Has anybody seen that?

In getting ntpd running on my ALIX 2c3, I found that the system clock
frequency was off by enough (in my case about 300ppm) that ntpd couldn't
lock the PLL.   With ntpd running the offset would steadily increase
until it got large enough that ntpd would decide to do a complete reset
and step to clock.

The solution I found was to install the adjtimex package, and configure
it appropriately to compensate for the way-off clock.  In my case,
setting TICK to 10003 did the trick.

The docs included in the adjtimex package are pretty good, but if you
need further pointers, feel free to ask.

Jeff