Clock tick timed out
Got Gentoo loaded on the new Dell PowerEdge SC430 tonight. Apparently the handbook only supports Stage 3 installs these days. Just one of the many things that have apparently changed since the last time I did a full install.
Everything went smoothly except for the inability to grab the time from the system’s hardware clock (via hwclock). It would fail to read /dev/rtc and then give the following error:
select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out
Apparently I’m not the only one who has run up against this issue, as there are quite a few references to it on the net. It could be related to ACPI, but a post about Debian Bug #277298 gave me a decent workaround. Fire up your favorite editor and add/modify the following lines in /etc/conf.d/clock:
CLOCK="local"
CLOCK_OPTS="--directisa"
Restart the clock service:
europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart
* WARNING: you are stopping a boot service.
* Stopping syslog-ng ...
* Setting system clock using the hardware clock [local] ...
* Starting syslog-ng ...
After that, everything works fine. Good enough for me.
April 14th, 2006 at 9:58 pm
Gentoo on a server… better you than me! I’ve already been through that hell…
April 15th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Heh. This is just for use at home, so it’s not like I’m running a multi-billion dollar corporation with it. So I’m not too concerned.
That said, I would consider Gentoo to be quite stable in experienced hands.
April 18th, 2006 at 10:42 am
It seems your timing (no pun intended) is impeccable!
For whatever reason, I am unable to use NTP at my job (perhaps the administrator is blocking it as a security measure?) Anyway, I tried using the ‘date’ command to set my clock a few weeks back, and my gentoo system time has been out to lunch ever since.
In an attempt to resolve this issue, I have used a variety of options available to hctosys. However, it seems that ‘hwclock –adjust’, ‘hwclock –hctosys’ and ‘hwclock –directisa’ all yield the same result — reverting to the system time which happens to be incorrect. Using the configuration script you mentioned fails to resolve the matter. I have even recompiled the kernel on several occations to no avail. :(
Is there any other way I can get the system time back on track without NTP? It seems that everytime I boot up the system, the time resumes from when ever it was last shut down — a day, a week, etc.
Please help.
April 18th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Did you confirm that the hardware clock is set to the correct time in the BIOS? Check that first and make sure it is correct.
April 19th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Still no worky! :(
It turns out that the time displayed by the BIOS was incorrect (i.e. it matched the time reported by Gentoo.) However, adjusting the time in the BIOS makes a rather interesting difference; an external LED clock on the computer’s front panel immediately reflects the update.
Nevertheless, Gentoo fails to acknowledge the updated information in the BIOS. The man page for hwclock seems to suggest what is going on:
“It is important that the System Time not have any discontinuities, such as would happen if you used the date(1L) program to set it while the system is running. (Since I did use the date command before I was aware of this, it seems that the “System Time” has elected to avoid any “discontinuities”; ergo, the apparent time lag.)
“You can, however, do whatever you want to the Hardware Clock while the system is running, and the next time Linux starts up, it will do so with the adjusted time from the Hardware Clock (Huh? That doesn’t seem to be the case here!). You can also use the program adjtimex(8) to smoothly adjust the System Time while the system runs.”
Well, I installed adjtimex, ran adjtimexconfig, and issued “rc-update add adjtimex boot” for good measure. Still no dice.
The system is a Sager NP9860, and is used in a multi-boot configuration that includes Gentoo, Debian and another OS on an NTFS partition. The other two systems seem to be paying attention; then again, I did unintentionally muck with the ‘date’ command on Gentoo.
Any suggestions?
April 28th, 2006 at 12:15 am
I’m about to install Gentoo on an SC430, and I was wondering what kernel and guide you used. Did you go genetic x86? or 64-bit?
May 10th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
or you can try
hwclock –show –directisa
September 25th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Awesome! That was the last elusive boot-up error I was seeing. I was working around it with NTP, but only after the system was running.
The other persistent problem I had was a “/System.map” file not being found. “modules-update” took care of that too.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Worked out great! I was not able to sync the local clock with the HW clock using
hwclock –hctosys
You fixed it for me
Thanks a lot for the help
May 15th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
In my Gentoo , it worked!
Thanks anyway