Verified - ntpd ignores the year part of refclock timestamps
Eric S. Raymond
esr at thyrsus.com
Wed Aug 30 11:56:21 UTC 2017
Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> The problem I'm interested in is not Y2K, it's GPS rollover. 1024 weeks is
> not an integral number of years. The day and month are garbage too.
Right, not the same problem.
> I agree this is a mess. I think we need a flag to go with with the year.
> Then we can update the drivers to provide the year (and set the flag) as we
> get to them.
It's easier than that. I already have a patch that passes the year into
clocktime, and you can always tell when you had a 4-digit year because the
value passed in will be > 99. All that's needed is one line to set the
yearstart variable from a 4-digit year number.
Dead easy to test, too. The NMEA driver uses a weird calendrical
trick I don't quite understand (that it says will only work until
2399) to deduce the current century and *always* passes 4 digits; all
that needs to be checked is if the new logic computes a sane yearstart
value - the existing code will do the rest.
While it's kind of weird that nobody fixed this before, it's a nice
improvement to add to our new-feature list. Makes it actually
possible to run autonomously starting from a zeroed system clock with
one or more local refclocks and no network peers.
> How many of the GPSD test sets for NMEA have 2 digit years?
Most of them. You don't get a 4-digit year unless the device emits
GPZDA, which is unusual - most consumer-grade hardware does not. The
mt3339 used in the Adafruit HAT does.
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