weird clock problem

[Nelis Lamprecht <nelis@brabys.co.za>]

Hi,

Over the past few weeks I've been having major problems keeping time on
my machine with kernel 2.6.5. At first I thought it was a problem with
ntpd but as it turns out it's my kernel.

The problem became evident while copying vast amounts of data across to
my machine. While I was copying data to it via scp my random
Xscreensaver kicked in displaying the clock and the first thing I
noticed was that the clock was advancing at a rapid rate. At the same
time I could not type anything as it would just repeat everything I
typed 10 fold. Basically the whole system behaved like it was on
steroids while I was copying to it and by the time I had finished
copying the clock was 2hrs ahead of time. With kernel 2.6.5 ntpd would
work on startup and then die saying no servers could be reached which I
assume was because my clock was so far off.

I have since downgraded to 2.6.3 and now ntpd is keeping time as it
should.

Anybody else come across this behaviour ? I'm running Gentoo on an IBM
ThinkCentre P4 3ghz. I also have APM enabled in both kernels.

Cheers,
Nelis

ps. Please CC me in on your reply as I am not subscribed.