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Bug 1565544

Summary: chronyd doesn't wait for late HW timestamps
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Reporter: Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar>
Component: chronyAssignee: Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact: Ondrej Mejzlik <omejzlik>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 7.5CC: mlichvar, omejzlik
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: chrony-3.4-1.el7 Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2019-08-06 12:41:34 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Miroslav Lichvar 2018-04-10 09:24:57 UTC
Description of problem:
When chronyd operating as an NTP client with enabled hardware timestamping receives a response from a fast and close server (e.g. an appliance with a hardware-based NTP implementation) before the hardware transmit timestamp of the request, the timestamp is not included in the calculation of the offset. If the server is so fast and close that a large number of measurements is missing the hardware timestamp, the accuracy of the system clock will degrade significantly.

The fix is to rework the NTP I/O code to wait a bit for late HW transmit timestamps before processing the fast response.

A related issue is that enabling kernel receive timestamping has a delay and it may not be enabled in time to timestamp the fast response. If the hardware receive timestamp was missing for any reason, chronyd would have to use the daemon receive timestamp, which may be very inaccurate due to the fix for the previous issue. The fix is to permanently enable the kernel receive timestamping.

Upstream commits:
https://git.tuxfamily.org/chrony/chrony.git/commit/?id=b1647dbcb757dbebb918d397e165808f0901b59d
https://git.tuxfamily.org/chrony/chrony.git/commit/?id=0df8328ceb8af68207b4cdfac8fe938fa87bfb2f
https://git.tuxfamily.org/chrony/chrony.git/commit/?id=8b1f68b1b4044a941d4f2ffc579aea1430ce432c

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
chrony-3.2-2.el7

How reproducible:
Requires special hardware

Steps to Reproduce:
1. configure chronyd with:
      server $HW_NTP_SERVER minpoll 0 maxpoll 0
      hwtimestamp * rxfilter none
      log measurements
   where $HW_NTP_SERVER is a close HW-based NTP server (peer delay + response
   time should be smaller than few tens of microseconds)
2. observe the last two columns in the measurements log

Actual results:
Some measurements (other than the first few) have kernel-kernel (K K), kernel-daemon (K D), or hardware-daemon (H D) timestamps.

Expected results:
All measurements except the first few have hardware-kernel (H K) timestamps.

Additional info:

Comment 7 errata-xmlrpc 2019-08-06 12:41:34 UTC
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2019:2076