[Voyage-linux] ntp drift with voyage linux 0.6

[Michael Cohen]

Hi List,
  I have an alix3 soekris board computer (geod based) which was
running great on Voyage 0.5 with stable NTP time. I have reinstalled
on a new flash card the latest 0.6 version but i found that the clock
now drifts very quickly. With kernel 2.6.26 the clock drift is extreme
(about 1 minute every hour). If the drift was smaller I might have
been able to correct it with cronning an ntpdate-debian every 10
minutes but this is not going to be sufficient for that kind of drift
level.

None of the 2.6.26 kernels seem to work - time was drifting very
quickly and ntp didnt seem to be setting it at all. I then installed
the 2.6.23 kernel back from 0.5:

Router1:~# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.23-486-voyage (2.6.23-2) (root at punknix-uml) (gcc
version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)) #1 PREEMPT Wed
May 21 15:31:49 GMT 2008

I tested it with ntpq -p

Router1:~# ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
 ip-72-167-54-20 204.123.2.72     2 u    1   64  377  184.097  125399. 3853.51
 ns1.your-site.c 198.82.1.203     3 u   20   64  377  243.286  125138. 3938.68
 point1.adamants 128.138.140.44   2 u   16   64  377  218.464  125207. 3929.94
 huggy.petdance. 208.100.0.38     3 u   26   64  377  249.463  125053. 3889.21

Which showed it was way off (probably after a couple of hours or
running). I then checked the kernel was using the right clocksource:

Router1:~# cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/*
pit jiffies tsc
pit

I checked the drift file thats written by ntpd
Router1:~# cat /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
0.000

which seems to me that ntp has given up on correcting this board.

I am currently at my wits end - i have no idea why it works fine in
0.5 but does not work in 0.6. Im also surprised that noone seem to
report this as a bug since it shows this bug with all the 0.6 kernels
(2.6.26-486-voyage and 2.6.26-2-686 and even the old
2.6.23-486-voyage) with a straight install (there is nothing really
special about this installation). There is definitely nothing wrong
with the hardward - if I put the old 0.5 card back in it works fine.

Can anyone please shed some light on the matter or at least provide
some pointers for further investigation? I really need to get the 0.6
working since I need the latest openvpn version. I dont mind if I need
to run an old kernel on a 0.6 distro but even this doesnt seem to
work. Maybe there is a bug with the new ntpd?

Thanks in advance
Michael.