[Voyage-linux] NTP: important drift in time

[Stefano Lucetti]

Jeff Dairiki wrote:
> 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
> 

Hi,
I'm using a few Alix1 boards with Voyage 5.2 and I'm experiencing a 
severe time skew too (up to a few minutes each day).
Since my application is not extremely time critical (and I don't 
want/need to have ntpd running), I decided to add an hourly crontab call 
to ntpdate-debian... Not that clean but it works...

Stefano