Re: [Dovecot] Time moved backwards by 4398 seconds

Bill Cole wrote:

You might even be better off configuring your system to not use the TSC as a clock source. There's a strong chance that you won't really be sacrificing anything that you actually use.

Time to conclude on this.

Rather than going along with my Dovecot hack, I went and changed to "clocksource=hpet", though I am not quite sure about the difference.

As I was about to reboot the server anyway, I applied the updates from Red Hat, including this one (RHSA-2008:0519-24):

• Due to a regression, "gettimeofday" may have gone backwards on certain x86 hardware. This issue was quite dangerous for time-sensitive systems, such as those used for transaction systems and databases, and may have caused applications to produce incorrect results, or even crash.

(The same kind of patch has been going in and out of the Ubuntu kernel, where it appears to cause trouble for suspend)

I have not seen the problem since applying those two changes, and am not currently willing to find out whether one of them is enough :)

Cheers, Anders.