Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (184 mails)

[Jonathan Brooks <jonathan.brooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steffen Moser wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> * On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 01:04 PM (+0100), Jonathan Brooks wrote:
> 
>> I have an AMD Athlon64 X2 machine running SuSE 10 (x86_64) on an Nvidia
>> Nforce4 Ultra motherboard, and have noticed that the system clock has
>> become unstable (it runs too fast). Not sure when it occurred, but I
>> have been getting a lot of error messages like this in dmesg:
>>
>> warning: many lost ticks.
>> Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts
>> rip acpi_processor_idle+0x12f/0x37f [processor]
> 
> I had a very similar (or the same?) problem on a "Tyan Thunder K8SE 
> 2892G3NR" dual Opteron machine running SuSE Linux 9.3: The system 
> time ran much too fast (minutes were almost running like seconds), 
> the screen saver started only seconds after not moving the mouse 
> or pressing a key and the log file was full of these messages ("many
> lost ticks").
> 
> My notice was that it especially happend when the CPU usage grew,
> so I suppose it was related to the "powernow" feature of the CPU,
> because at least on Opteron systems SuSE's "power management" 
> changes the CPU clock based on the load. 
> 
> After I upgraded to the most recent vanilla kernel the problem was
> gone. 
> 
> The problem is: I got this idea that it may have to do with the CPU 
> clock changes done by the "power manager" after I had changed the
> kernel (which solved the problem for me), so -I'm sorry- I haven't
> tested whether the problem would have been also solved by setting 
> the "power management" to a fixed valued instead of "dynamic". But,
> of course, you could give it a try if you haven't, yet.
> 
> I've also found another discussion thread in a Gentoo forum about 
> this problem:
> 
>   http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=191716
> 
> Perhaps there are some hints that may help you.
> 
> HTH,
> Steffen
> 

Hi Steffen,

Thanks for the suggestions - I've had a look at the gentoo thread, and
it seems like adding clock=pmtmr notsc to the boot command may fix this
problem without having to upgrade the kernel - which I am reluctant to
do, since it's always caused me headaches in the past. Which kernel are
you running?

Interestingly, this has knock on effects in vmware:
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1420

where the tick issue suddenly causes your virtual machine to either act
like it's on speed or on marijuana.

I hope SuSE release a new kernel soon with a load of fixes for all the
AMD64 related issues. I bought this machine to help with my work, and
thus far it's been a complete nightmare.

Best wishes,

Jon.

-- 
Jonathan Brooks (Ph.D.)
Research Assistant. PaIN Group,
Department of Human Anatomy & Genetics,
University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QX
tel: +44(0)1865-282654
fax: +44(0)1865-282656
web: http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/~jon