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Leap Second Bug Causes Crashes

Posted by samzenpus on from the slip-it-in-there dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with a Wired story about the problems caused by the leap second last night. "Reddit, Mozilla, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software underpinning their online operations choked on the “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks. On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second."

3 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. What about Windows and Mac? by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So far all I've heard about is affected Linux systems, did Windows and OS X just fine?

  2. Re:Linux kernel unable to cope? I think not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I run Arch Linux with kernel 3.4.4 and it went haywire. My machine was very heavily loaded at the time and when the leap second happened mysqld, firefox, and ksoftirq processes started consuming 100% CPU. The load factor was well over 10 and the machine was grinding along. It didn't actually fail but it was loaded down.

    Even restarting the processes didn't fix it. The high load would go away once I stopped the processes but as soon as I started them again the load would come right back. I had Firefox open on a blank page not doing anything and it was slammed at 100% CPU and had a could ksoftirq tasks slammed at 100% CPU each too.

    I had to reboot the machine to get it back to normal.

    I have Ubuntu and Debian servers that for whatever reason did not add the leap second so they were fine. Their time was a second off today though (at least until ntp slowly corrected it or I manually intervened).

  3. Only Linux affected? by cpghost · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm managing a cluster of 2,400 nodes running FreeBSD, and AFAICS, none was tripped off by leap second NTP adjustments. On the other hand, 4 out of 180 Linux nodes crashed simultaneously at that very moment. All this is exceedingly weird, but may indeed point to a subtle bug in the Linux kernel (only?). I've never witnessed this behavior in the past.

    --
    cpghost at Cordula's Web.