Package: linux-image
Version: 3.16.43-2+deb8u2
Severity: important
Tags: patch,fixed-upstream
This should backport fairly easily to stretch, but it applicable to jessie as
well. The goal is to reduce the spammy nature of timesync log messages and make
this as manageable as NTP, especially as many users want NTP and host timesync
to coexist in virtualized environments.
Upstream commit:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit/drivers/hv?h=v4.12.3=3716a49a81ba19dda7202633a68b28564ba95eb5
hv_utils: implement Hyper-V PTP source
With TimeSync version 4 protocol support we started updating system time
continuously through the whole lifetime of Hyper-V guests. Every 5 seconds
there is a time sample from the host which triggers do_settimeofday[64]().
While the time from the host is very accurate such adjustments may cause
issues:
- Time is jumping forward and backward, some applications may misbehave.
- In case an NTP server runs in parallel and uses something else for time
sync (network, PTP,...) system time will never converge.
- Systemd starts annoying you by printing "Time has been changed" every 5
seconds to the system log.
Instead of doing in-kernel time adjustments offload the work to an
NTP client by exposing TimeSync messages as a PTP device. Users may now
decide what they want to use as a source.
I tested the solution with chrony, the config was:
refclock PHC /dev/ptp0 poll 3 dpoll -2 offset 0
The result I'm seeing is accurate enough, the time delta between the guest
and the host is almost always within [-10us, +10us], the in-kernel solution
was giving us comparable results.
I also tried implementing PPS device instead of PTP by using not currently
used Hyper-V synthetic timers (we use only one of four for clockevent) but
with PPS source only chrony wasn't able to give me the required accuracy,
the delta often more that 100us.
