Sorry to revive an old thread, but did anything ever come of this? The
project pages exist, but only minimally.

On 5/11/06, Rainer Orth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We propose the creation of an NTP project on OpenSolaris.ORG, affiliated
with the Nevada and Device Driver communities.

While historially SunOS 4 and Solaris have been platforms of choice for
NTP timekeeping and leading-edge development, Solaris has fallen behind
other platforms (notably FreeBSD) in recent years.  This is due to a couple
of issues:

* The NTP daemon and utilities have seen much development in preparation
  for the upcoming NTPv4 standard.  Unfortunately, Solaris still ships the
  ancient xntp (NTPv3) daemon.

* The NTP kernel support has evolved beyond the code currently in Solaris,
  but those enhancements have not been picked up.

* There's a multi-vendor API for reference clocks that provide a
  pulse-per-second signal (PPS API, RFC 2783).  While Solaris has some
  support for PPS devices, it failed to implement the PPS API
  specification.

* Recent serial interface chips have seriously degraded NTP performance
  due to extended on-chip buffering, so current systems have become
  considerably worse for attaching serial reference clocks.

* The PPS serial support in the kernel is a private interface that was
  not published in the DDI, so only onboard serial ports are supported.

* The TOD synchronizaton model is fundamentally broken in Solaris and
  has resulted in unstable system clocks and wasted thousands of dollars
  in support calls and needlessly replaced hardware.

* The adjtime system call slews the clock in a way that can disrupt NTP
  time networks.

This project seems to remedy those problems and again turn Solaris into a
primary NTP deployment and development platform.

Project leaders will be Brian Utterback and myself.

        Rainer

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
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