[LinuxPPS] PPS stops working after a few seconds

[clemens at dwf.com]

> Hi!
> 
> I lost my recent work on LinuxPPS stuff due to a hard disk failure (I 
> know, I know, ....).
> 
> Now I am back on track trying to get the LinuxPPS stuff working again.  
> I already build Folkerts ppsldisc version and tried to use it during my 
> system startup, but it looks like the PPS stuff hangs after a while. I 
> see that there is an entry in /sys/class/pps/pps0/assert but it does not 
> increase anymore. It gets stuck around #36 and never goes up afterwards, 
> no matter how often I kill ppsldisc and restart it.
> 
> The strange thing is that when I do not start ppsldisc during my system 
> init phase, login to the unit afterwards and manuall kill ntpd, start 
> ppsldisc and then restart ntpd, it seems to work.
> 
> My guess is that one of the other pieces of software that are running on 
> my machine are doing something with the serial port that sends the PPS 
> stuff into the bin.
> 
> Any ideas on what I could do besides starting this stuff manually?
> 
Well, thank god there are two of us...

Ive been having the exact same problem now for a couple three months.
USUALLY, if I try starting by hand (and not by init.d) it works.  Sometimes
the init.d start will have hung things so badly that it cant be restarted
and I have to reboot with the init.d start turned off.

Ive tried to put together a piece of example code to show the problem,
but have failed there,- your comment about perhaps something else playing
with the serial port, would explain that.  And as Ive noted, this happens
ONLY on one of my two machines running NTP, the other starts fine from
the init.d script.

Strange, and something we should understand.


-- 
                                        Reg.Clemens
                                        reg at dwf.com