[ntp:hackers] smearing the leap second

brian utterback brian.utterback at oracle.com
Tue Jun 23 22:51:39 UTC 2015


On 6/23/2015 6:16 PM, Greg Dowd wrote:
> The thing I keep trying to understand is that, if the client needs to be modified to understand the smear data, and the smear data is based on the availability of the leap data upstream, why can't the client just decide to do this without any additional payload modifications?  
>
> If leap is set and 24 hours to leap window, start slewing at desired rate.  Or step, or smear, or whatever you want?  I do understand the concept of getting them all to move together as a reasonable goal for ntpd, I just don't quite understand the logic of the backwards compatible, hidden transmission scheme.

Exactly. In an ideal world every client knows that a leap second is
scheduled and can be configured individually to handle it how it
chooses. Of course we want to be able to deal with this for older
clients, but that needs to be as clean and restrictive a change as
possible. I don't know the answer of how best to do this, but I am
pretty sure we haven't thought about it enough.

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