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error: Interrupted system call

From Robert Richardson on Fri, 07 Jan 2000

Hi James

I am not sure who I should direct this question to: I have Dell 5100 workstation running RedHat Linux 6.0 (Kernel 2.2.5-15), setup with NTP to provide time for LAN. It works great but I sometimes, see in the the NTP log file, the message "29 Dec 16:28:33 ntpd[634]: select(11, #---#--#---, 0L, 0L, &0.000000) error: Interrupted system call". This causes no problems, as far as I can tell, but is there anything I should be concerned about. I will appreciate any information you can provide. Attached is a copy of the NTP log file. Thanks

I'm not sure what's causing this. However, I'd suggest a couple of rather simple steps:

First there was a bug on the default XFree86 servers and some of the video cards that were shipping with some Dell systems. The symptom was a very slow system clock. The solution was to upgrade the XFree86 RPMs.

Second, the 2.2.5 kernels that shipped with Red Hat 6.0 were pretty bad (as Linux kernels go). I'd strongly recommend an upgrade to the 2.2.14 kernels (which are MUCH more stable).

So download the kernel sources and build it. I don't recommend using the RPM (or any package managment system) for doing kernel upgrades. I just use the main sources and build them using the Makefiles (usually using make menuconfig).

In this case I suspect a combination of an XFree86 bug and a kernel bug which is causing the problems with the system clock. xntpd could easily be sensitive to these sorts of things.

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 50 February 2000

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