[LEAPSECS] Motherboard timekeeping quirks

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Mon Jun 1 02:06:45 EDT 2015


--------
In message <20150601044400.AF215406057 at ip-64-139-1-69.sjc.megapath.net>, Hal Mu
rray writes:
>
>Steve Allen said:
>> UCO/Lick knows that, even with the best available version of NTP, the sloppy
>> (or even lack of) hardware clock on some motherboards means that some
>> Windows systems cannot do better than 1 to 2 seconds. 
>
>Are there really motherboards out there that are so badly broken than they 
>can't keep decent time?

I have met a couple of motherboards which were fundamentally broken in
this area, mostly as result of stupid thermal design or close to fraudulent
sourcing of components.

Under UNIX+NTPD the result is either much larger than usual offsets or
occational timesteps of 200-500msec magnitude.

99.9% of all designs work just fine.

>Or is the problem that kernel software doesn't do the right thing with some 
>combination of features?

In Windoes there is no "kernel software" to do the right thing in the
first place.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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