Charles Sprickman wrote:
Hello all,
I've been digging through Google for more information on this. I have a
4.8 box that's been up for about 430 days. In the last week or so, top
and ps have started reporting all CPU usage numbers as zero, and running
"systat -vmstat" results in the message "The alternate system clock has
died! Reverting to ``pigs'' display".
I've found instances of this message in the archives for some 3.x users,
some pre 4.8 users and some 5.3 users.
There were a number of suggestions including a patch if pre-4.8, sending
init a HUP, and setting the following sysctl mib:
"kern.timecounter.method: 1".
I'm already at 4.8-p24, so I did not look into patching anything, and
HUP'ing init and setting the sysctl mib does not seem to have any effect.
I'm not quite ready to believe that some hardware has actually failed.
Perhaps due to the long uptime something has rolled over?
We had this once at work, quite a while ago. The "alternate system
clock" is in fact the Real Time Clock (RTC) on the mainboard. In our
case we were lucky in that it was just the quartz device that failed due
to an improperly soldered lead which finally came off. We fixed the
soldering and the problem was gone.
Now, there are of course plenty of other hardware reasons why the RTC
can fail, even temporarily like in your case. Perhaps it is really time
for a new mainboard.
Uwe
--
Uwe Doering | EscapeBox - Managed On-Demand UNIX Servers
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.escapebox.net
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