NTP and IRIX

[Dave Olson]

In <SCP.90Dec10100929 at grizzly.acl.lanl.gov> scp at acl.lanl.gov (Stephen C. Pope) writes:
| 	I've managed to get NTP running under IRIX 3.3.1/2, and it
| works, but not well.  The problem has to do with whatever the IRIX
| equivalent of BSD's ``tickadj'' variable is - the quantum is set far
| too large, and NTP has a hard time getting the kernel zeroed in on the
| correct value to adjtime(2).

The only limitation on adjustment value is that it not cause the number
of seconds converted to microsecs to overflow a long.  The clock itself
is skewed at a rate whose maximum value is a #defined in the clock code;
this value is currently the same as the default tickadj in 4.3 BSD at
240 msec/minute.  There is a bit more code to deal with very small and
very large adjustments.  Since it isn't a variable, you can't change
it unless you are adventurous enough to patch the clock code.

There is also the timetrim variable in master.d/kernel, which lets you set
the number of nanoseconds/second of clock skew, independent of adjtime()
and any time daemons.

| 	(BTW: looking in /usr/sysgen, it appears that the ``fastclock''
| is off, but without adb, who can tell?!?)

Try the ftimer command.  It will tell you whether it is on or off, as
well as allowing you to change it on the fly.  You could also use
dbx -k /unix /dev/kmem if you really wanted to do so...
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.