[ntp:hackers] smearing the leap second
Mike S
mikes at flatsurface.com
Thu Jul 9 17:02:17 UTC 2015
NTP shouldn't be involved in "smearing" time, at all. The only reason
for smeared time is because of systems (e.g. POSIX) which don't properly
support leap seconds. Any smearing should be done by the OS, not NTP,
which should strictly follow UTC. To do otherwise is to deliberately
break NTP.
Even then, NTP and parts of RFC 5905 are fundamentally flawed even in
that regard - it's supposed to count leap seconds with a "monotonically
increasing" timescale, but in practice has the same flaw as POSIX. It's
simply not a well designed (or documented for that matter, search for
"leap" in the RFC) protocol.
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