discrete units

[Hal Murray]

Gary said:
> I think he is referring to reecent proposals to split ntpd up into multiple
> daemons.  Daemons for the core, NTS, clients, etc.  Each doing a small job.
> Rather than the one big daemon we have now. 

That sort of split looks good on paper, but I'm not sure how well it would 
work out in practice.

It would be relatively easy to split out the server side of NTS-KE.  There is 
a lot of code that is common to both the client and server sides.

The NTS-KE server needs to make cookies and the cookie key changes daily.  The 
NTS-KE server could watch the file.  Or we could setup a cookie-server on ntpd 
accessed via a pipe or such.  That all adds a layer of complexity.

It would be relatively easy to split off the ntpd server from the client part. 
 I want to do most of the work to get threads.  If we do that, we need a way 
to get data from the client to server.  That needs to be lightweight, so we 
need something like shared memory.  As the SHM refclock driver demonstrates, 
we haven't been good at that.  (This case would be easier since we control 
both ends and don't have to think about backward compatibility.)

Everything is tangled up with mode6/ntpq.


-- 
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