what was up with ntp again?

Daniel J. Luke dluke at geeklair.net
Wed Apr 29 12:43:31 PDT 2015


> On Apr 28, 2015, at 4:14 PM, Jan Stary <hans at stare.cz> wrote:
> So the Apple NTPd is a stripped down ntp.org implementation?
> Or is it a different implementation, decidedly omitting some
> aspects of NTP (nanosecond precission)?

you can check for yourself and see Apple’s changes:

10.10.1 has - http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/ntp/ntp-92/

>> The real fix for this is someone needs to rehabilitate open(s)ntp, which is
>> lighter weight by design but these days only supported on OpenBSD. I'm not
>> holding my breath.
> 
> The last release of http://www.openntpd.org/portable.html
> happened about a month ago and explicitly states that it is
> "known to build and work" on Mac OS X (10.9).

yay!

I think more recent openntpd fixed many of the issues that made it a poor generic choice. Some interested party should probably make sure macports has the most recent version and maybe report back on how well it works. (looks like the compat implementation of adjfreq just returns ENOSYS, though).

> On Mar 23 12:43:04, dluke at geeklair.net wrote:
>> There's also work going on a new daemon (ntimed) that will likely eventually be the 'best' ntpd replacement (it doesn't work on Mac OS X yet either, though).
> 
> And it won't work on OS X for some time, judging by page 35 of
> https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/ntimed_ntpd_replacement/attachments/slides/788/export/events/attachments/ntimed_ntpd_replacement/slides/788/ntimed.pdf

someone just needs to write an implementation of time_unix.c (https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed/blob/master/time_unix.c) - and maybe expose some KPI to do it (and/or lobby Apple to provide the missing API). There was some older post on one of the darwin mailing lists about someone having done something similar in the past, so there may even already be code that one could use to do it [effort, though, so it might not happen until/if Apple decides to replace their ntp with ntimed].

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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