On Tue, 28 Aug 2007, Marco Neubauer wrote: > just got my 5501 a few days back. > It's running fine, except that the rtc is running much faster than realtime.
Known problem. Lots of people seem to have it, including me. Seems to be 5501-specific, as there have been no reports of it happening on 4[58]01 boards. Read the archives of this group to see reports of this, and to see proposed cures. For me, the easiest fix was to run a NTP daemon (as the machine usually has network connectivity available). Note that the clock is so unstable that the NTP daemon had a hard time stabilizing the clock, and still occasionally gives up (meaning human sysadmin gets an e-mail, and has to fix the clock and restart NTP by hand). I'm sure that configuring NTP better, and maybe switching from OpenNTP to standard NTP could help with that, but for now it is working good enough (for my purposes, others might see it differently). The other fix that really helps it to configure your OS to use the interval timer (the option is something like "PIT", on BSD-style OSes it seems to go into the kernel options, I can get details of this later). Note that this leaves a huge problem: While the computer is off (meaning the OS is not running), the BIOS clock will advance extremely fast. Which implies that the next time the OS boots, it starts from a ridiculously wrong time. Unfortunately, at least OpenNTP will refuse to move the clock by a large amount when starting, and the machine will continue to run with a ridiculously wrong time. For now, my fix is to manually set the clock with an rdate command on startup (on Linux, the moral equivalent might be ntpdate). This then has the disadvantage that network connectivity is required when booting, since the system will hang (or start with the wrong time) otherwise. The fix is obvious: Never turn the machine off or reboot it; which is a good strategy anyhow, because on reboot the disk is not found, so manual intervention is required there. It would be good if a BIOS update to the 5501 fixed this. Just like the IDE disks that vanish on reboot, this problem is not a total killer (the machine is fundamentally functioning), but it is a hassle and causes extra work. And I hate work. -- Ralph Becker-Szendy [EMAIL PROTECTED] (408)395-1435 735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
