On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 12:18 AM David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > [...] > Well, that's a mouthful. And what am I to call the time that a system > issues using that system default time zone?
The kernel clock counts ticks. The ticks are relative to Epoch, which is UTC. Ticks are what you see in the output of dmesg. So maybe call it UTC, GMT or Zulu? > If I boot up two computers > and they display different times, what term is appropriate in your > opinion to describe the time displayed? The NTP folks call them timekeepers when they are correct, and falsetickers when they are incorrect. But "them" are timeservers participating in the NTP protocol. See <https://www.ntp.org/reflib/papers/ptti.pdf> and RFC 5905, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5905>. If the OS is not keeping accurate time, then I would call it a falseticker. If you only boot two computers, then you cannot be sure which computer is the falseticker. You need three or more time sources to determine which is the falseticker. As the saying goes, a person with a watch knows what time it is. A person with two watches is never sure. Jeff
