Google's New Public NTP Servers Provide Smeared Time (googleblog.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday December 1, 2016 @02:47AM from the fixing-things dept.

Google says it has built support for the leap second into the time servers that regulate all Google services. An anonymous reader shares a blogpost by Google:No commonly used operating system is able to handle a minute with 61 seconds, and trying to special-case the leap second has caused many problems in the past. Instead of adding a single extra second to the end of the day, we'll run the clocks 0.0014% slower across the ten hours before and ten hours after the leap second, and "smear" the extra second across these twenty hours. For timekeeping purposes, December 31 will seem like any other day. All Google services, including all APIs, will be synchronized on smeared time, as described above. You'll also get smeared time for virtual machines on Compute Engine if you follow our recommended settings. You can use non-Google NTP servers if you don't want your instances to use the leap smear, but don't mix smearing and non-smearing time servers.

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Tired of this shit. by LTIfox · 2016-12-01 03:41 · Score: 5, Interesting

Can we just move to TAI and convert to UTC only when interfacing the meatspace?
1. Re:Tired of this shit. by LTIfox · 2016-12-01 03:51 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I mean, we have timezone stuff already - just bury those seconds in those tables. Run machine clock at TAI and calculate "local time" by adding, for example, 8hrs35seconds to whatever local timekeep says.