Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
I was thinking of the cost of doing all the arithmetic in BCD. The NTP timestamps are exchanged between systems for the purpose of synchronizing to UTC; there is no advantage to exchanging them in BCD. They do not have to be "people readable"!
OK, that's perfectly valid. I agree that the NTP protocol should always use a compact format which is hardware friendly, i.e. something _very_ similar to the current 32:32 fixed-bit format. The only obvious improvement would be for all packets to also keep around a TAI-UTC offset number, since that would make it trivial to handle both leap seconds and provide the OS/applications with a monotonic time scale along with the regular UTC pseudo-seconds.
OTOH, using BCD really wouldn't matter much since effectively all (modulo a few startup packets with -g in force) NTP timestamp comparisons/subtractions happen on numbers which are very close, i.e. only the seconds and fraction fields needs to be operated on, and this is easy to do in parallel for BCD numbers, it is only a small constant factor slower than a binary subtraction.
The other important part, which is steering the local clock via adjtime is much more dependent upon binary numbers, since it needs to do multiplications and/or divisions on fractional numbers.
Terje -- - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
