[ntp:questions] Power-saving patch to NTP

Miroslav Lichvar mlichvar at redhat.com
Fri May 16 12:29:47 UTC 2008


On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 06:51:24PM +0200, Jan Ceuleers wrote:
> I came across the following page:
> 
> http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/known.php
> 
> which says the following on ntpd:
> 
> "By default, the ntp time synchronization daemon will wake up once per 
> second, and will make the kernel do work on it's behalf even more. Red 
> Hat has created a patch to ntp to fix this issue and ships it in their 
> rawhide and FC7 ntp packages. You can download this patch from the 
> Fedora cvs server."
> 
> Has anyone here looked at that patch? Does it compromise correctness of 
> the algorithms?

A bug report for this issue is here:
https://support.ntp.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=802

There are two different patches, the first one is just looking ahead
for the next event and it should be safe to use (at least on Linux).
The second patch implements a queue timer, it is more complex and
harder to maintain. In the Fedora CVS is maintained the first patch,
a version for the latest stable ntp release can also be found there.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar



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