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Date:      Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:38:26 -0400
From:      "Bob Johnson" <fbsdlists@gmail.com>
To:        "David Allen" <the.real.david.allen@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: calcru: runtime went backwards errors
Message-ID:  <54db43990806300738n33d10fe7te27b9c9f3c295a4@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <2daa8b4e0806300627s39d49347r9e0e5675e4c25088@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <2daa8b4e0806300627s39d49347r9e0e5675e4c25088@mail.gmail.com>

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On 6/30/08, David Allen <the.real.david.allen@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been seeing errors like the following appearing:
>
> Jun 30 03:13:57 ford kernel: calcru: runtime went backwards from 261
> usec to 258 usec for pid 516 (devd)
[...]
> Jun 30 03:13:57 ford kernel: calcru: runtime went backwards from 486
> usec to 481 usec for pid 0 (swapper)
>
> and narrowed down the cause to openntpd.
>
> Do these errors fall into the Mostly Harmless category?

It's probably just an annoyance, unless it is happening so often it
causes other problems.

The FreeBSD FAQ used to have a nice explanation of this, but it has
been replaced by a discussion that simply assumes the problem is
caused by the Intel SpeedStep implementation on your motherboard:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/troubleshoot.html#Q5.24.

But in general, this error can be caused by several things, including
a device that is slow to respond to interrupts. One thing that often
helps on SMP systems is to make sure your timecounter isn't using TSC:

$ sysctl kern.timecounter
kern.timecounter.tick: 1
kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(-100) HPET(900) ACPI-fast(1000) i8254(0)
dummy(-1000000)
kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-fast
[...]

- Bob



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