> >> People have been working for the past 15 years to make leap seconds > >> better, yet in the last leap second all Linux kernels crashed due > >> to a subtle bug that is only triggered when there was a leap second. > > > >My understanding wasn't that all Linux kernels crashed. > > Only the ones which cared enough about time-keeping to run NTPD.
... and that were running a particular old-but-not-too-old version of the Linux kernel. And it didn't happen everywhere. And it didn't crash machines, just got them very busy looping blocked by in-kernel locks (which is perhaps worse than a crash, depending on what matters). The patch to fix the bug was published in main-line Linux more than three months before the leap second occured: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6b43ae8a619d17c4935c3320d2ef9e92bdeed05d but the patch didn't get deployed everywhere it needed to be deployed, and the wedge up of some web site server farms made news: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/leap-second-glitch-explained/all/ -Tim Shepard [email protected] _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
