Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pests 859 days ago
Isn't this what Google dubbed as smearing in their Spanner paper?
2 comments

Kinda. Clock slewing is the term used in NTP-land and is basically about making this kind of adjustment for small time differences (generally you want to run a control loop that adjusts the rate of the internal clock so that the time difference goes to zero, as opposed to simply changing the time, as one will result in a smooth time reading while the other will cause periodic jumps). Smearing is basically pretending that the leap second doesn't exist and using clock slewing to paper over the difference.
AFAIK they were using Linux, and they were still keeping all the servers synchronised (smearing at the same rate).