Now, the puzzling. This is an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ on an ASUS A7N8X deluxe ver 2.0 m/b. The symptom is that ntpd refuses to sync. Dropping
AMD 3200+, -42.0.2-x86_64 kernel. My ntpd works just fine, up kernel. Discovers pit/tsc timer, and works great with no lost ticks, even with cpuspeed and idle throttling. I use external servers for ntpd.