Clock source and NTP control

To view the available clocksource options for your machine, look into the /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0 directory. This directory also shows the current clock source that your machine is using. You will need sudo privileges to access this information:

user@machine:/sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0$ sudo more available_clocksource

tsc hpet acpi_pm pit jiffies

user@machine:/sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0$ sudo more current_clocksource

hpet

Usually, your machine will pick the "best" clock source from the available options at start up, but if you want to force the selection of a particular clock source, you can do this by including the desired option in the configuration file that the system uses at the time of start-up, namely /boot/grub/menu.lst

user@machine:/boot/grub$ sudo vim menu.lst

Add the clock source option at the end of the line declaring the kernel path, as shown below:

title Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.24-26-generic

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-26-generic root=UUID=cea24a64-f038-469c-b716-226ab0da2f93 ro quiet splash clocksource=tsc

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-26-generic

quiet

Save and restart your machine. The desired clock source should show up in the /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource file.

To start/stop or restart the ntp demon on your machine from the command line, do:

user@machine$ sudo /etc/init.d/ntp stop

[sudo] password for user:

* Stopping NTP server ntpd [ OK ]