Hal Murray wrote:
> I'm running Fedora Core 6 on a 2.8 GHz P4/Xeon (2 hyperthreaded CPUs).
> I'm running a 2.6.19 kernel - my own config file, no changes to the
> official sources.
>
> I just updated a whole bunch of software (yum update) and rebooted
> my system. (same kernel)
>
> NTP's drift went from 151 ppm to 115 ppm.
>
> Has anybody seen anything like that? Any hints on where I should
> start looking?
>
> I'm pretty sure I saw something like this a while ago, probably in
> the other direction. but I didn't investigate. I think I have
> enough log files to find it if that is likely to help. There may
> have been a kernel switch.
>

This happened to me once. I think I was using acpi_pm as my clocksource
in the Linux kernel, then I compiled ACPI out of the Linux kernel and
rebooted. Oops.

Each Linux clocksource has its own frequency. On my PC, it's about 33.2
PPM for acpi_pm, 35.5 PPM for pit, and 95.3 for tsc. Whether tsc works
differently on a 2-CPU system, I don't know. If ntpd was stable on 151
PPM, and now it's stable on 115 PPM, maybe that's what happened.

Michael