On 6/2/2023 5:03 PM, David Woolley wrote:
On 02/06/2023 18:17, Mohammed Siddiqi wrote:
I am currently working on making sure NTP works according to the RFC
5905 and we use NTP.org implementation of ntpd. I have been going
through the RFC and NTP.org’s documentation
If you want a definitive implementation of the RFC, you need the ntp.org
version that was current at the time of its publication, and represents
the reference implementation. The current source code will include
improvements.
I suspect Dave Mills considered the RFC to be more like a research
paper, describing things as they were at the point at which it was
written, rather than as a standard, frozen for all time.
That is pretty much all true, David.
To be slightly picky about it, please see:
https://support.ntp.org/Dev/ReleaseTimeline
The first alpha code release of ntp4 was in September of 1997, and the
first production release was in August of 2001.
There were 3 major ntp4 code releases before
draft-ietf-ntp-ntpv4-proto-00 in July of 2005, and 3 more major code
releases before RFC 5905 and 5906 were published, in June of 2010.
The process of reconciling the code and the Standard took 5 years, and
as I recall that when there was a discrepancy between the code and the
proposed Standard, about 90% of the time the Standard was changed.
We've had one major release of the code since then, and are in
preparation for another.
Dave Mills has ALWAYS been more interested in performance and behavior
than in following the Standard. This makes perfect sense to many of us,
as we're more interested in good timekeeping and behavior than we are in
"following a specification".
I don't know if anybody has ever audited the code and RFCs 5805 and 5806
to "find the closest match."
I know there have been some diversions between the Standard and the
code. From "our" POV, the code does a better job of timekeeping than
the Standard.
Oh, and Dave also considers the 2nd edition of his book, "Computer
Network Time Synchronization", to be a better specification than the RFCs.
An example of the above would be
https://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2085, which took nearly 2 years'
time to resolve. In particular, the comments contain a lot of
information about the intricasies and subtlety involved.
--
Harlan Stenn <st...@nwtime.org>
http://networktimefoundation.org - be a member!
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