> Does PPS tell us anything about the actual source of time?

Not really.

> Or does that just mean "time from a serial port"?

Even that is only a "probably".  PPS is "pulse per second"; it does not
provide time per se, but does provide a reference for where the
boundaries between seconds fall, thereby allowing refinement of
approximate time obtained from elsewhere.  A PPS signal could come in
over a parallel port, a dedicated GPIO pin, or pretty much anything
else imagination can dream up.

Of course, PPS-based time is only as good as the source of the PPS
pulses, the hardware to accept them, and the software infrastructure to
use them.  I would hope that anyone running a stratum-1 server based on
a PPS signal would go to some lengths to make sure the resulting time
is good, but of course nothing actually *prevents* someone from setting
up a PPS setup with a bad reference signal, bad hardware, and/or bad
software, and advertising the resulting server as stratum 1.  (If used
in a sane setup, it will be tossed out by the selection algorithms once
it's drifted a little, of course, but that's a separate issue.)

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