[Sheflug] Shonky Linux

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] alexhudson.com>]

How? How on earth have I never noticed????

My laptop.... for the umpteenth time t'other day I noticed the clock was
out of sync. Now, I'd always put this down to the clock being odd when I
suspended to disk, stopping or freezing (note this is utter crap, see
later) and so I popped an 'ntpdate' sync in my pcmcia conf, so that the
laptop would query the network time server on reanimation and all would
be well. The problem really used to annoy me because when transferring
dev projects around, make would complain about clock skew, or CVS would
start having a bit of argy. 

ANYWAY.... it turns out that's not the problem at all. Never has been.
How I realised is a long story, but it's to do with configuring new
network time servers, and realising that every time I resynced to the
network clock my clock was always well out, by a matter of seconds,
sometimes more. Even I know that quartz crystals are +-30s/day. I then
executed 'date' a few times in succession, and realised the time wasn't
changing. Turns out, when I reanimate the laptop, the master interrupt
(which drives the clock) gets set to 18Hz rather than the 100Hz Linux
expects. So, for the past few years (I've had this laptop a while now, I
think) my clock has been running at approx. 1/5th 'real-time', and
what's more, I haven't noticed!!

I've recompiled the kernel, and now everything's fine after a bit of
fiddling, but it really does go to show doesn't it...  it also means
that my laptop's bogomips rating, which I always thought was ~260, isn't
anything of the kind, and is actually 46. :(. Rather more bogus than
usual, then.

I just thought I'd share this with the list so you could all have a good
laugh at me anyway :))

Cheers,

Alex.

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