Failing back to INSANE timesource :) Time stopped today.

[Niclas Gustafsson <niclas.gustafsson@codesense.com>]

Hi,

I'm running Linux 2.6.5  on a IBM xSeries 305 with a Intel P4 2.8Ghz.

And something is very very wrong, I'm getting the following last
messages in dmesg:

------
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 52 to 0
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 53 to 1
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 54 to 2
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 55 to 3
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 56 to 4
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 57 to 5
set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 58 to 6
Losing too many ticks!
TSC cannot be used as a timesource.  <4>Possible reasons for this are:
  You're running with Speedstep,
  You don't have DMA enabled for your hard disk (see hdparm),
  Incorrect TSC synchronization on an SMP system (see dmesg).
------

The problem seesm to be related to heavy loads.
I experienced a similar problem yesterday. The machine completly hung
after that and i had to cut the power to reboot it. Now however it is
responsive and I can log on to it through ssh.

Problem is that the clock stopped completly! - I've never seen anything
like this before. 

Local time is about 11 am here and a time gives me:

[root@s151 root]# date
Thu Apr  8 03:51:21 CEST 2004

...10 s later, using my wristwatch, not sleep 10 ;)

[root@s151 root]# date
Thu Apr  8 03:51:21 CEST 2004


Any ideas anyone, I'd really like to know why it is behaving this way.


Other usful(?) info from dmesg:
---
Detected 2800.731 MHz processor.
Using tsc for high-res timesource
...
init IO_APIC IRQs
 IO-APIC (apicid-pin) 1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 2-6, 2-7, 2-8,
2-9, 2-10, 2-11, 2-12, 2-13, 2-14, 2-15, 3-0, 3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 3-4, 3-5,
3-6, 3-7, 3-8, 3-9, 3-10, 3-11, 3-12, 3-13, 3-14, 3-15 not connected.
..TIMER: vector=0x31 pin1=2 pin2=-1
..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
...trying to set up timer (IRQ0) through the 8259A ...  failed.
...trying to set up timer as Virtual Wire IRQ... works.
Using local APIC timer interrupts.
calibrating APIC timer ...
..... CPU clock speed is 2798.0750 MHz.
...
----

Oh, yeah, I'm running NTP on the machine, however the client seems to be
sleeping for the next time-poll.
I'm also using this machine as a ntp server and one client has the
following to say:

[root@s131 tmp]# ntpdc
ntpdc> peers
     remote           local      st poll reach  delay   offset    disp
=======================================================================
*time2 192.168.4.131  2 1024  377 0.00067  0.004991 0.01482
=time1 192.168.4.131  2 1024  377 0.00085  0.000558 0.01485
=s151  192.168.4.131  3 1024  377 0.00021 -25494.16 0.01482

Where s151 is the machine that is on freeze.



Cheers,

Niclas