Re: Setting monotonic time?

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Mon, 1 Oct 2018, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> In the context of process migration there is a simpler subproblem that I
> think it is worth exploring if we can do something about.
> 
> For a cluster of machines all running with synchronized
> clocks. CLOCK_REALTIME matches. CLOCK_MONOTNIC does not match between
> machines.   Not having a matching CLOCK_MONOTONIC prevents successful
> process migration between nodes in that cluster.
> 
> Would it be possible to allow setting CLOCK_MONOTONIC at the very
> beginning of time?  So that all of the nodes in a cluster can be in
> sync?
> 
> No change in skew just in offset for CLOCK_MONOTONIC.
> 
> There are also dragons involved in coordinating things so that
> CLOCK_MONOTONIC gets set before CLOCK_MONOTONIC gets used.  So I don't
> know if allowing CLOCK_MONOTONIC to be set would be practical but it
> seems work exploring all on it's own.

It's used very early on in the kernel, so that would be a major surprise
for many things including user space which has expectations on clock
monotonic.

It would be reasonably easy to add CLOCK_MONONOTIC_SYNC which can be set in
the way you described and then in name spaces make it possible to magically
map CLOCK_MONOTONIC to CLOCK_MONOTONIC_SYNC.

It still wouldn't allow to have different NTP/PTP time domains, but might
be a good start to address the main migration headaches.

Thanks,

	tglx