Re: [PATCH RFC V1 0/5] Rationalize time keeping

From: John Stultz
Date: Thu May 03 2012 - 15:57:46 EST


On 04/27/2012 01:12 AM, Richard Cochran wrote:
Just in time for this year's leap second, this patch series presents a
solution for the UTC leap second mess.

Of course, the POSIX UTC system is broken by design, and the Linux
kernel cannot fix that. However, what we can do is correctly execute
leap seconds and always report the time variables (UTC time, TAI
offset, and leap second status) with consistency.

The basic idea is to keep the internal time using a continuous
timescale and to convert to UTC by testing the time value against the
current threshold and adding the appropriate offset. Since the UTC
time and the leap second status is provided on demand, this eliminates
the need to set a timer or to constantly monitor for leap seconds, as
was done up until now.

So as I mentioned in my earlier review of this patch set, I'm not as excited about the meta-layer you added in utc-tai.h.

So I figured I'd give it a short go and see if a good chunk of what your proposing could be done in a simpler way.

Please check out:
http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/jstultz/linux.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/dev/clktai

The untested patch set there basically pushes TAI time management into the timekeeping core, and then exports a CLOCK_TAI clockid.

This patch set *does not* address the tick-granularity delayed leap-second processing issue that your patch also addresses. But I feel like the basic handling of tai is a little simpler.

Take a look at it and let me know what you think.
thanks
-john

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