Subject: Re: Updating Xen's time-of-day clock
To: Jed Davis <jdev@panix.com>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
List: port-xen
Date: 05/05/2006 16:22:39
On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 07:29:08PM -0400, Jed Davis wrote:
> Attached is a patch to have the NetBSD dom0 periodically reset Xen's
> time-of-day clock; there's a sysctl to change the interval or disable
> the functionality entirely. More eyes/opinions are desired (also
> about the sysctl name; "machdep.xen_timepush_ticks" is a little
> unwieldy).
>
> Currently, we set Xen's time only on settimeofday(2); so, if the time
> is being disciplined by ntpd or by periodic runs of ntpdate that use
> adjtime(2), then Xen's clock will continue to drift. This is bad
> because domU use that value to set their clocks on boot (and resume),
> and Linux in particular defaults to tying its local clock to the
> hypervisor's.
>
> The Linux dom0 does this every 60 seconds (which, for usual values of
> drift, will keep the step size under a tick); out of probably
> excessive paranoia that that might line up with a cron job or
> something and cause strange non-reproducible problems, I used a less
> round number.
Looks good to me.
--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
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