Re: Setting monotonic time?

[Andrey Vagin]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 11:15:32AM +0200, 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?

Here is a question about how to synchronize clocks between nodes. It
looks like we will need to have a working network for this, but a
network configuration may be non-trivial and it can require to run a few
processes which can use CLOCK_MONOTNIC...

> 
> 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.
> 
> Dmitry would setting CLOCK_MONOTONIC exactly once at boot time solve
> your problem that is you are looking at a time namespace to solve?

Process migration is only one of use-cases. Another use-case is
restoring from snapshots. It may be even more popular than process
migration. We can't guarantee that all snapshots will be done in one
cluster. For example, a user meets a bug, does a container snapshot and
attaches it to a bug report.

> 
> Eric