Re: [tip:timers/ntp] ntp: adjust SHIFT_PLL to improve NTP convergence

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> wrote:

> John Stultz wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 01:22 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
>>> I might be missing something here - but Linux converging faster  
>>> seems like a genuinely good thing. What non-Linux problem could  
>>> there be? Linux's convergence is really Linux's private issue. 
>>
>> Yea. It does seem that way. Miroslav can likely expand on the 
>> issue to help clarify, but as I understand it, the example is if 
>> you have a number of systems that are peers in an NTP network. 
>> All of them are using the same userland NTP daemon. However, if 
>> the rate of change that corrections are applied is different in 
>> half of them, you will have problems getting all the systems to 
>> converge together.
>
> Would this not be true already, because the convergence of Linux 
> system suddenly became a lot slower in 2.6.19?
>
> Damned if we do, damned if we don't - except the new behaviour 
> introduced by your patches is nicer.

Not just that - but there's calibration noise during bootup that can 
cause randomly distributed recalibrations as well. So other hosts in 
a mixed environment will see inconsistencies anyway, after every 
bootup.

NTP is all about being able to be resilient against time noise and 
being able to sync up to a common time base ASAP.

	Ingo