Michael D. Kralka wrote: > Robert wrote: > >> Following the update this morning, NTP is failing with the same symptoms >> that I saw several years ago (pre-CentOS, I believe) when Anaconda >> mistakenly blessed my ASUS A7N8X, Athlon (CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+ >> stepping 00) based system with an SMP kernel. The symptom is that NTPD >> never establishes sync with a server, showing over the top jitter values. >> > > Several years ago with a Gentoo installation I experienced an identical > problem with an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, also with an AMD Athlon > XP 2600+. After a lot of experimenting, I discovered that if the FSB > Spread Spectrum feature was enabled with ACPI, spurious timer interrupts > were generated, causing the system (Linux) clock to tick fast and ntpd > to fail to sync with any time source. > > Who knows whether a BIOS update will fix this problem, but a quick test > would be to disable the FSB Spread Spectrum feature and see if that > fixes the problem. > > Cheers, > Michael > YES! I changed the FSB Spread Spectrum from "0.50%" to "disabled", saved, rebooted and the problem is gone. Thanks for the help! BTW, I had already checked for a BIOS update. Best regards, Robert