Hello John, You had me confused for a bit with your very quick patched version of chrony because suddenly a default installation no longer reproduced the problems :-)
This issue has also been been discussed extensively on the debian-sparc list [1]. There are some false starts in that thread, but I think this [2] post and the thread following it contains relevant information. One problem is that the Mostek RTC driver currently does not support the RTC_(RD/SET)_TIME. However, the thread contains a patch that will fix this. I am not completely sure if this patch is final yet or if has will be (has been) submitted for inclusion in the kernel. Please let us know your/upstream's thoughts on this. From an strace [3] I ran on chrony when it fails and floods the logs, it seems that the main problem is in the use of RTC_UIE_ON, RTC_UIE_OFF calls as the clock chip does not have an interrupt node. Perhaps some error handling can be added there. I hope this helps. Cheers, Frans Pop [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/04/msg00115.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/04/msg00149.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/04/msg00170.html