5.1 RELEASE: clock running wild?

[Chris Pressey]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 08:09:26 -0700
"Kevin Oberman" <oberman at es.net> wrote:

> As stated, V5.x questions should go to freebsd-current@, not stable.

FWIW, I get this too on 4.9-RC (Oct 13th).
(Until now I thought it was a hardware problem.)

> The problem you are seeing has shown up on a few mobos. The most
> common is the ASUS P5A, but others have also reported the issue.
> It appears to be a bug in the board ACPI firmware. The clock runs at
> exactly double speed.

This describes my situation exactly (ASUS P5A, ACPI, clock x2)

> The problem is bad enough that simply using ntp
> is inadequate, but it is easily worked around.
> 
> Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to contain
> "kern.timecounter.hardware="TSC". This will make the clock run
> correctly after a reboot.

Trying this, upon boot, I get:
sysctl: kern.timecounter.hardware: Invalid argument

Leaving out the quotes around TSC seems to work though.

Beautiful, no more playing around with timed/ntpd/clockspeed!  Thanks.

-Chris