[Voyage-linux] Clock Drift

[Michael Cohen]

2010/8/26 Robert <Robert at supporttime.com>:
> Hello Guys,

Hi Robert,

> I cannot use the ‘nomfgpt’ work around as we rely on the watchdog and doing
> so breaks it.

We found that sometimes the boards lock up and do not recover even
with the watchdog. The problem seems to be that the software watchdog
is not activated until the kernel loads the module and runs the
service. If the CPU locks up during POST or early boot the box remains
US. We are looking at solutions based on a hardware watchdog instead
now.

> I have installed adjtimex and ntp:
>
> apt-get install adjtimex
> apt-get install ntp
>
> Which I thought may solve the issue as some others have suggested but even
> with this the clock still drifts wildly, and after just a couple of hours
> the clock is already several minutes out of sync.

Thats the same behaviour I have found. For some unexplained reason, I
found that older voyage linux (0.5) work much better but 0.6 and on do
not. We are currently using an old image for this reason.

> Can anyone offer any other advice? I could always schedule a cron task to
> correct the clock but that seems so hacky.

The hardware is hacky too so this is probably the best workaround. The
clock quality on the Alixes seems to be very poor.

Michael