Bug 3744

You can't expect xntpd -- a program that requires a running cpu
to keep track of time -- if you run another program apmd that stops
the cpu from running.

You don't get the time warp in Windows because Windows just
reads the battery backed up hardware clock and uses that as
the system time. You also don't get a system time on windows that
is usually within 10 ms of a primary reference clock on windows
either; that's the funxtion that xntpd performs that requires a
running cpu.

Umm.  Perhaps you misunderstood.

After screen blanks out from APMd, I lose an half an hour!  More than
once!!  With striking regularity!

The ntpdate shows how much drift is being caused by the apm daemon.
The example I showed had 2000 seconds.   THAT'S SIGNIFICANT!

The clock isn't busted, I just spent hours in 95, and no time drift.

it apmd.

I know it.

I'm re-opening the bug.

Umm.  Perhaps you misunderstood.

After screen blanks out from APMd, I lose an half an hour!  More than
once!!  With striking regularity!

The ntpdate shows how much drift is being caused by the apm daemon.
The example I showed had 2000 seconds.   THAT'S SIGNIFICANT!

The clock isn't busted, I just spent hours in 95, and no time drift.

it apmd.

I know it.

I'm re-opening the bug.

I have similar APMD problems, and I'm not running xntpd.

Here's what I've found.  Sometimes, when my laptop wakes up, the time
is set wrong.  Not reliably, tough.  I store my time in real time (not
UTC), and there seems to be some problems with that.  The following is
the output of repeated executions of "date" when I put the machine to
sleep and then wake it up.

snapdragon: init.d $ while true; sleep 1; do date; done
Sat Aug 28 12:46:38 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:46:39 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:46:40 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:46:41 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:46:42 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:46:43 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:46:44 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28  8:47:16 AM EDT
Sat Aug 28  8:47:18 AM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:47:18 PM EDT
Sat Aug 28 12:47:19 PM EDT


In other words, when it wakes up, it temporarily restores the time as
if it was stored in UTC, and then immediatly (within 2 seconds)
switches it back.  THis is the "good" outcome, since the date finally
reaches the right value.  But it's still weird.  And sometimes, I'm
not sure why or when, I leave it for a while and find it set on the
wrong time, that is, set to the time it would be if I stored the date
in UTC.

This is really a bit weird.  I fixed a similar problem on my desktop
some time ago by changing /etc/sysconfig/clock so that instead of
reading:

UTC="yes"
ARC=false

it read:

UTC=true
ARC=false

That fixed some problems, but I did the same thing on my laptop to no
avail.

I'm running Linux on a Dell Solo 2500.  (lovely machine, btw.;)

Running APM and xntp makes no sense since the xntpd requires
periodic time stamps every 1-60 seconds while apmd turns off
the cpu. Run ntpdate every 5 mins from cron to synchronize with a
server if you wish to work around the problem.

I'm not sure if the above response from jbj@redhat is to my post, but
let me reiterate: I am NOT using xntpd.  I find similar problems even
so.  So whether or not it's a good idea to use xntpd on a laptop is
irrelevant.

------- Additional Comments From   08/30/99 10:01 -------
After reading recent comments, I went in and recompiled my kernel --
I set the setting that time is local instead of UTC (it's in the Power
Management settings section), and now every time the apm daemon
launches, I don't lose 4 hours anymore.

That was it, you see.  When apm started, I would be losing around
14,400 seconds -- about 4 hours. It never made much sense to me as to
why I was losing about the same amount of time with each apm suspend.

The apm daemon *should* be able to figure out the difference between
which mode the system is in, without requiring a recompilation of the
kernel.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6052 ***