[ntp:questions] NTP vs chrony comparison (Was: oscillations in ntp clock synchronization)

Maarten Wiltink maarten at kittensandcats.net
Thu Jan 24 09:04:04 UTC 2008


"Unruh" <unruh-spam at physics.ubc.ca> wrote in message
news:KRXlj.27807$yQ1.16375 at edtnps89...
> "David J Taylor"
<david-taylor at blueyonder.neither-this-bit.nor-this-bit.co.uk> writes:

>> chrony falls at the first hurdle for me - there appears to be no native
>> Windows implementation.
>
> Correct. chrony is not implimented on nearly as many platforms as ntp.
>
> There were plans once upon a time, but life got in Curnoe's way.
> Anyway, I am NOT advocating everyone change to chrony. I am trying to
> understand the clock discipline algorithm. It uses a lot of the special
> features of linux.

And that is _not_ a good thing. To win over the world, as the other David
(Woolley) predicts elsewhere, it would need to be available on Windows at
least. That might actually happen. But to win over some of the people who
_really_ matter, it would have to be implemented in a simple, transparent,
and platform-neutral way, and to be driven by clock engineering, not code
writing. The other other David (the original Dave) can *prove* that NTP
will not go unstable under a variety of adverse conditions. Curnoe may
have years of logs showing that chrony keeps offsets lower than ntpd, but
standards laboratories are likely to shrug that off as anecdotal evidence,
not proof.

And anybody who's really serious about timekeeping seems to be playing with
reference clocks on FreeBSD. Err...

Groetjes,
Maarten Wiltink





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