Crazy Clock

**twoHats** · 11-30-2005

Hi all - I recently purchased an Athlon64 X2 machine, and wanted to get Linux on it asap. Well - long story short - I found my dream distro in Mandriva 2006. I have been able to tweak away most of the minor glitches (mouse, monitor etc) but there is a strange bug that i can't even find the culprit for.

Every once in a while, when in X, the timing on the system seems to just go south. Cursors blink at amazing rates, the clock accelerates to about 10 mins per min. If i shut down all user programs, and shut down X - then restart X, everything comes back fine.

Anyone got any ideas. I did see similar clock behavior from running a non smp kernel.

Thanks for any and all theories on this

**KG6KVQ** · 11-30-2005

If it is an HP system they released a BIOS update for this (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/s...tem=ob-36843-1)

Another fix is to pass noapic and no_timer_check to the kernel at boot.

If neither of those work some people have noticed clock issues related to frequency scaling.

**twoHats** · 11-30-2005

Thanks for the quick reply! It is an HP system - I will try the BIOS update first.

Thanks again

**KG6KVQ** · 11-30-2005

Let me know if it works (I have an AMD64 that I have been waiting to convert to linux until I can get a driver that will work for my eth0 in 64 bit)

**twoHats** · 11-30-2005

The hp update is for a laptop - I have a dual processor desktop.

Tried the other like:

Code:

...
append="splash=silent noapic no_timer_check"

hung on start up looks like during hw detection-

tried just noapic ... hung

tried just no_timer_check ... hung

I havn't done anything with networking yet - still trying to get one machine in satisfactory shape first

i'm actually looking to shut off eth check at startup - do you know the file?

**twoHats** · 11-30-2005

I just realized in all the rebooting - i never tried just no_timer_check - that seems to be booting normally ... YES!

Now to see if it fixes the problem - I'll report back here in a day or so.

**twoHats** · 12-01-2005

Yes!

The no_timer_check seems to have done the job for me.

Next is my usb - serial modem connection ... then ...

an endless list of fun stuff to do!

Thanks again

**twoHats** · 12-15-2005

The crazy clock thing returned despite the no_timer_check.

The symptoms are:

I notice the clock updating minut every second.

quit X

as root set clock through use of

Code:

date --set="date stuff"

then startx again - clock stoill crazy - so i shut doiwn X.

keyboard is now locked! I have to hard boot.

Anyone?

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Crazy Clock

Still trying ...

oops - i lied <blush>

Thanks, it worked ...

Well - That wasn't it...

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