Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

[b. f.]

> I just put FreeBSD 8.1 up on an old (but good) 500 MHz Celeron with
> half a gig of RAM. Interfaces are classic xl (3Com) and dc (DEC
> tulip). Works quite nicely except for one quirk: ping times that
> ought to be positive (no more than 200 ms worst case) are coming
> out negative! Can't figure out what might be causing this. dmesg
> output is as follows:

If you are just upgrading now, why not use 9 BETA?  I think that your
older machine will be much happier -- the new timer code in 9 has a
bunch of bugfixes, allows for a wider choice of alternative timers, in
case some are broken, and places lighter loads on the system, by
allowing some (formerly periodic) timer use to be deferred.  And then
there is the host of other improvements...

b.