[ntp:questions] Power-saving patch to NTP

David Woolley david at ex.djwhome.demon.co.uk.invalid
Fri May 16 06:58:07 UTC 2008


Jan Ceuleers wrote:

> The Linux kernel has recently gone tickless, meaning that it only 
> schedules a wakeup for itself at the first time that it knows a timer 
> will expire. A quick intro on that can be found here:
> 

Given the Linux kernel developers' past history of breaking NTP, have 
they made all the necessary enhancements to gettimeofday to ensure that 
it progresses the kernel discipline correctly to account for the missing 
updates.  (Of course it also needs to do the same when it does schedule 
a clock event.

Have they considered the resulting increased processing time, and more 
importantly, variability in processing time of gettimeofday?

To really go tickless well with NTP you need to move the kernel time 
discipline into the hardware!




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