Subject: My clock is too fast under BSD/OS, what do I do?
Date: 11/19/97

Many new (inexpensive) motherboards have poor clocks that are often too fast. BSD/OS normally runs with a 100hz clock (10,000us/clock tick). You can use the bpatch command under BSD/OS to adjust the value of the variable tick, which is the systems idea of how much time has passed in a "1/100th second" tick. Adjusting this number down will cause the system time to increment more slowly, helping to adjust for the fast system clock. Oh one of my systems I used a value of 9932. You will need to use trial and error to determine just the right value. I used the following shell fragment in my /etc/rc.local file.

if [ -r /etc/tick ] ; then
        echo 'patching tick for your absurdly fast clock'
        tick=$(cat /etc/tick)
        if [ $tick -gt 9000 -a $tick -lt 10000 ] ; then
                        bpatch -r tick $tick
        fi
fi