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Bender a day ago

Google's proposal is a smear. [1] Most time servers do not use smear. No idea what behavior it may introduce in places where sub-second time is important. Curious if all these bugs [2] were fixed specifically to deal with going backwards.

[1] - https://developers.google.com/time/smear

[2] - https://rivassec.com/leap-second-chaos-2012.html

yen223 16 hours ago | parent [-]

The brilliant thing about the smear is that it distributes the new second across each second of the day, so that each second differed by 1/86400 seconds, well within the margin of error for NTP.

As far as the computers were concerned, nothing was different.

toast0 7 hours ago | parent [-]

The less brilliant thing about the smear is that if your ntpd syncs from smeared and unsmeared servers, the results aren't great.

It would have been better if they would have kept the time on the wire accurate or added mandatory protocol stuff to avoid confusing things for ntpds configured to different leap second handling.