weird kernel/ps interaction

[Tim Walberg]

I'm not sure whether this is a kernel issue or an issue
with ps, but I'm curious if anyone else has ever seen
this, and if there's a patch/workaround for it. Here's
the symptom:

calvin:/home/tew> date; sleep 5 & ps -e --format "lstart cmd" | grep 'sleep 5 >
Fri Jun 30 07:13:49 CDT 2000
[2] 19173
Wed Jun 21 03:12:58 2000 sleep 5
Wed Jun 21 03:12:58 2000 grep sleep 5
7:13am up 18 days, 8:01, 9 users, load average: 0.21, 0.31, 0.43

Note the discrepancy between the current actual date and the
date that ps reports as the process start time. I find it
rather interesting that, if you do the math, the difference
between the two times is pretty close to exactly half of
the system uptime. I especially wonder if that's significant
since the system is a dual cpu machine.

System is based on a SuperMicro P6DNE (dual 200MHz PPro)
and is running 2.2.14+raid+onstream+crypto. I've seen this
since 2.2.5 (which is the earliest I've ever tried, it may
have happened before that) and through 2.2.15 (haven't tried
.16 yet, since I'm still waiting for the onstream patch for
it). The ps package is the procps-2.0.2-2 from RedHat (the
system was originally RH 6.0, but has had quite a few
other modifications).

Any info you can provide would be appreciated...

tia,
tw

--
+--------------------------+------------------------------+
| Tim Walberg | tewa...@mediaone.net |
| 828 Marshall Ct. | www.concentric.net/~twalberg |
| Palatine, IL 60074 | |
+--------------------------+------------------------------+

[Jonathan D. Poole]

Does cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep bogomips report Identical or slightly off
mips for the cpu's?

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep bogomips
bogomips : 399.77
bogomips : 400.59

# date ; sleep 5 & ps -e --format "lstart cmd" | grep 'sleep 5'
Fri Jun 30 09:42:48 EDT 2000
Fri Jun 30 04:22:57 2000 grep sleep 5
Fri Jun 30 04:22:57 2000 sleep 5
9:43am up 10:40, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Mine looks quite simular