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