Losing too many ticks! .... on a VIA epia board

Thomas S. Iversen
2004-09-14T07:41:44Z

Hi There

I have just hooked up my new via mainboard
(http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_ms_spec.jsp?motherboardId=281)

and installed the latest linux kernel on the system (2.6.8).
Unfortiunatly something is misbehaving with the timer/kernel interaction.

A snippet from dmesg:

agpgart: Detected VIA CLE266 chipset
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 424M
agpgart: AGP aperture is 4M @ 0xe7000000
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex
NET: Registered protocol family 17
Linux Kernel Card Services
options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
NET: Registered protocol family 10
Disabled Privacy Extensions on device c0340d60(lo)
IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x07 (Driver version 1.16ac)
apm: overridden by ACPI.
mtrr: 0xe0000000,0x1000000 overlaps existing 0xe0000000,0x800000
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
padlock: Using VIA PadLock ACE for AES algorithm (multiblock).
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
.....
and then finally

Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
Losing too many ticks!
TSC cannot be used as a timesource.
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).
Falling back to a sane timesource now.

Furthermore editors like jed and emacs takes forever to start. A "strace
emacs /somefile" shows that it hangs in a poll right after gettimeofday.

Any clues to what is wrong and how I go about fixing it?!

Regards Thomas, Denmark