Mac mini: serious clock drift
Hi there,
I am having issues with clock drift on my G4 Mac mini. The clock drifts
so much that even ntpd can't keep up with it. I keep getting messages
like "time reset +2.404131 s" from ntpd approximately every 15 to 20
minutes.
Also, the drift ntpd records in /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift keeps growing
until I get messages stating "frequency error 507 PPM exceeds tolerance
500 PPM", and the like. The only way I know of "fixing" these is to
stop ntpd, remove the ntp.drift file and start ntpd again. Then the
frequency error slowly starts to rise again, until it once more exceeds
the maximum of 500 PPM. The time it takes to get to this point varies,
but this usually occurs once a week or once every two weeks.
I have experienced this problem with every 2.6 kernel I have run on my
Mac mini, up to and including the current version 2.6.18-4-powerpc.
I have never experienced such problems running OS X on the same machine
(although I haven't run OS X that much), so maybe this is a kernel bug?
Any help pinpointing and/or solving this problem is appreciated. My
/proc/cpuinfo is attached; I think it would also be useful to know if
people with the same machine have similar problems or not.
Cheers,
Bram Senders
processor : 0
cpu : 7447A, altivec supported
clock : 1416.666661MHz
revision : 0.2 (pvr 8003 0102)
bogomips : 83.20
timebase : 41620907
platform : PowerMac
machine : PowerMac10,1
motherboard : PowerMac10,1 MacRISC3 Power Macintosh
detected as : 287 (Mac mini)
pmac flags : 00000010
L2 cache : 512K unified
pmac-generation : NewWorld
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