<h3><tt>tickadj</tt> - set time-related kernel variables</h3>
<p>Last update: <csobjformat="ShortTime"h="25"locale="00000409"region="0"t="DateTime"w="61">18:50</csobj> UTC <csobjformat="LongDate"h="25"locale="00000409"region="0"t="DateTime"w="246">Thursday, July 28, 2005</csobj></p>
<p>The <tt>tickadj</tt> 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 <tt>/dev/kmem</tt>. Newer machines with precision time support, including Solaris, Tru64, FreeBSD and Linux (with PPSkit patch) should NOT use the program. The particular variables that can be changed with <tt>tickadj</tt> include <tt>tick</tt>, which is the number of microseconds added to the system time for a clock interrupt, <tt>tickadj</tt>, which sets the slew rate and resolution used by the <tt>adjtime</tt> system call, and <tt>dosynctodr</tt>, 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.</p>
<p>By default, with no arguments, <tt>tickadj</tt> 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 <tt>tickadj</tt> variable if the intent is to run the <tt>ntpd</tt> Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon, and prints this as well. Since the operation of <tt>tickadj</tt> when reading the kernel mimics the operation of similar parts of the <tt>ntpd</tt> program fairly closely, this can be useful when debugging problems with <tt>ntpd</tt>.</p>
<p>Note that <tt>tickadj</tt> should be run with some caution when being used for the first time on different types of machines. The operations which <tt>tickadj</tt> tries to perform are not guaranteed to work on all Unix machines and may in rare cases cause the kernel to crash.</p>
<h4>Command Line Options</h4>
<dl>
<dt><tt>-a <i>tickadj</i></tt>
<dd>Set the kernel variable <tt>tickadj</tt> to the value <i><tt>tickadj</tt></i>specified.
<dt><tt>-A</tt>
<dd>Set the kernel variable <tt>tickadj</tt> to an internally computed "optimal" value.
<dt><tt>-t <i>tick</i></tt>
<dd>Set the kernel variable <tt>tick</tt> to the value <i><tt>tick</tt></i> specified.
<dt><tt>-s</tt>
<dd>Set the kernel variable <tt>dosynctodr</tt> to zero, which disables the hardware time-of-year clock, a prerequisite for running the <tt>ntpd</tt> daemon under SunOS4.
<dt><tt>-q</tt>
<dd>Normally, <tt>tickadj</tt> is quite verbose about what it is doing. The <tt>-q</tt> flag tells it to shut up about everything except errors.
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 <tt>adjtime</tt> 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 <tt>tickadj</tt> program went away.
