Re: [SLE] SuSE9.2 - kernel: Losing some ticks...checking if CPU frequency changed.

3 Feb 2005

      On Wednesday 02 February 2005 15:14, Mario Ohnewald wrote:
...
Hello List,
i have a K7S8X ASROCK motherboard, 256MB ram and an AMD Duron 1.6Ghz.
When i try to install suse9.2 from a FTP-DVD, i get this error on tty4
and it freezes:
  kernel: Losing some ticks...checking if CPU frequency changed.
I have already tried apci=off and SafeSettings.
Then i loaded the default Bios settings, and took out my PCI modem,
disabled onboard Audio and Lan.
Memtest ran 12h and its ok.
Has anyone ideas how i could solve this?!
FTP or NFS install freezes with the same error.
It doesn't have to be dangerous. In the kernel source we find

/* sanity check to ensure we're not always losing ticks */
                if (lost_count++ > 100) {
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "Losing too many ticks!\n");
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "TSC cannot be used as a 
timesource.
  \n");
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "Possible reasons for this are:
\n");
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "  You're running with Speedstep,
\n"
);
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "  You don't have DMA enabled for 
yo
ur hard disk (see hdparm),\n");
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "  Incorrect TSC synchronization 
on
an SMP system (see dmesg).\n");
                        printk(KERN_WARNING "Falling back to a sane timesource 
n
ow.\n");

                        clock_fallback();
                }
                /* ... but give the TSC a fair chance */
                if (lost_count > 25)
                        cpufreq_delayed_get();

and cpufreq_delayed_get is what prints the message you see. It could be from 
many possible sources, not all of them involving fried hardware

Re: [SLE] SuSE9.2 - kernel: Losing some ticks...checking if CPU frequency changed.

Anders Johansson