Recommendation leans toward "no", but is not firm. Back before we had STP, I used to say "no", then changed my story to "yes, run it". Lately not so sure.
6 or 7 or more years ago, the point was ... dozens or hundreds of Linux guests ... do you want them all running NTP? At first, "we" said no way! But it turned out that NTP was one of the better behaved services on Linux. It starts, samples time, sleeps for a really long time, wakes and makes comparisons, maybe adjusts, sleeps more. It was the first thing we turned off, but turned out to be the LAST thing we NEEDED to turn off. That was before STP. STP changes things. Lately, I'm just not sure, and I don't have measurement to know ... yet. I also hear from at least one person who has studied it that he STILL does not recommend NTP on the guests. In any case, the mainframe clock has always been way more stable than other HW platforms. If your build of NTP includes the stand-alone 'ntpdate' program, you could run that at IPL time and then OCCASIONALLY. -- R; Rick Troth Velocity Software http://www.velocitysoftware.com/ On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Scott Rohling <scott.rohl...@gmail.com> wrote: > Was having a conversation today about running Linux on System z and whether > it needed to run an NTP client -- the statement being STP is used to keep > the mainframe time in synch, so why run NTP on a Linux guest - the system > time is correct. My understanding is that Linux maintains it's own clock > so even if z/VM fully supported STP, it doesn't mean the guests would > necessarily benefit. I haven't done a lot of research into time > synchronization, so I thought I'd ask what others here do and why. Any > input would be appreciated! > > Scott Rohling > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For more information on Linux on System z, visit > http://wiki.linuxvm.org/ -- -- R; Rick Troth Velocity Software http://www.velocitysoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
