tickadj(8)						      System Manager's Manual							tickadj(8)

NAME

       tickadj - set time-related kernel variables

SYNOPSIS

       tickadj [ tick ]

       tickadj [ -Aqs ] [ -a tickadj ] [ -t tick ]

DESCRIPTION

       The  tickadj  program  reads,  and optionally modifies, several timekeeping-related variables in older kernels that do not have support for
       precision ttimekeeping, including HP-UX, SunOS, Ultrix, SGI and	probably  others.  Those  machines  provide  means  to	patch  the  kernel
       /dev/kmem.  Newer  machines  with  kernel time support, including Solaris, Tru64, FreeBSD and Linux, should NOT use the program, even if it
       appears to work, as it will destabilize the kernel time support. Use the ntptime program instead.

       The particular variables that can be changed with tickadj include tick, which is the number of microseconds added to the system time for  a
       clock  interrupt,  tickadj, which sets the slew rate and resolution used by the adjtime system call, and dosynctodr, which indicates to the
       kernels on some machines whether they should internally adjust the system clock to keep it in line with time-of-day clock or not.

       On Linux, only the tick variable is supported and the only allowed argument is the tick value.

       By default, with no arguments, tickadj reads the variables of interest in the kernel and displays them. At the same time, it determines	an
       "optimal"  value for the value of the tickadj variable if the intent is to run the ntpd Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon, and prints this
       as well. Since the operation of tickadj when reading the kernel mimics the operation of similar parts of the ntpd program  fairly  closely,
       this can be useful when debugging problems with ntpd.

       Note  that  tickadj should be run with some caution when being used for the first time on different types of machines. The operations which
       tickadj tries to perform are not guaranteed to work on all Unix machines and may in rare cases cause the kernel to crash.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS

       -a tickadj
	       Set the kernel variable tickadj to the value tickadjspecified.

       -A      Set the kernel variable tickadj to an internally computed "optimal" value.

       -t tick Set the kernel variable tick to the value tick specified.

       -s      Set the kernel variable dosynctodr to zero, which disables the hardware time-of-year clock, a prerequisite  for	running  the  ntpd
	       daemon under SunOS 4.x.

       -q      Normally, tickadj is quite verbose about what it is doing. The -q flag tells it to shut up about everything except errors.

FILES

       /vmunix /unix /dev/kmem

BUGS

       Fiddling  with  kernel  variables at run time as a part of ordinary operations is a hideous practice which is only necessary to make up for
       deficiencies in the implementation of adjtime in many kernels and/or brokenness of the system clock in some vendors' kernels. It  would	be
       much better if the kernels were fixed and the tickadj program went away.

SEE ALSO

       ntpd(8)

       The official HTML documentation.

       This file was automatically generated from HTML source.

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