Re: Clock drift on TransmetaCrusoe

[george anzinger <george@mvista.com>]

Michèl Alexandre Salim wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Searching through the mailing list I could not find a
> reference to this problem, hence this post.
> 
> Having ran various kernel and distribution
> combinations (SGI's 2.4.2-xfs bundled with their Red
> Hat installer, 2.4-xfs-1.0 and 2.4 CVS trees, Linux
> Mandrake with default kernel 2.4.3, and lastly
> 2.4.5-ac9), compiled for generic i386 and/or Transmeta
> Crusoe with APM off or on, one thing sticks out : a
> clock drift of a few minutes per day.
> 
> This problem might not be noticeable for most users
> since notebooks are not normally left running that
> long, but it is rather serious. I can choose not to
> sync the software and hardware clock on shutdown and
> re-read the hardware clock every hour or so but it is
> rather kludgy.
> 
> Anyone experienced this before or willing to try it
> out?
> 
This is most likely a bad "rock" (crystal) in the box.  There is a
"built in" drift of about .1445 seconds a day (runs too slow) due to the
fact that 1.193180Mhz can not be divided to 10 ms. but you are way over
this.  

Here is a bit of code to sync your system to the RTC:

http://www.linuxppc.org/software/index/linuxppc_stable/software/adjtimex-1.9-3.ppc.html

Of course, you best bet would be to use the xntpd code to sync to
another system.

George