sys_fuzzMime-Version: 1.0

[Hal Murray]

gem at rellim.com said:
> Makes no sense to me.  Adding randomness helps when you have hysteresis,
> stiction, friction, lash and some other things, but none of those apply to
> NTP.

The NTP case is roughly stiction.  Remember the age of this code.  It was 
working long before CPUs had instructions to read a cycle counter.  Back 
then, the system clock was updated on the scheduler interrupt.  There was no 
interpolation between ticks.

Mark/Eric: Can you guarantee that we will never run on a system with a crappy 
clock?  In this context, crappy means one that takes big steps.

I thinnk that all Gary's test proved is that his system doesn't have a crappy 
clock.

There is an additional worm in this can.  Some OSes with crappy clocks bumped 
the clock by a tiny bit each time you read it so that all clock-reads 
returned different results and you could use it for making unique IDs.
 
If we are serious about getting rid of that code, I'll put investigating that 
area higher on my list.  I  think we have more important things to do.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.