[Bug libc/9690] glibc time functionality broken with kernel 2.6.26 and later

["hvengel at astound dot net" <sourceware-bugzilla at sourceware dot org>]

------- Additional Comments From hvengel at astound dot net  2009-02-07 06:31 -------
I know it changes the ABI.  In any case the situation with current kernels,
glibc and ntp is clearly broken and should to be fixed.

The patch in question was submitted to the glibc email list almost a year ago
and the kernel changes that the patch was designed to address were released as a
stable kernel about 5 months ago.  The current timex.h header is based on linux
version 2.2 and is now out of sync with recent kernels.  

The patch is not mine and I was under the impression that it was submitted by a
glibc developer but I could be wrong.  In any case the person who submitted the
patch to the mailing list asked about how the ABI issue should be addressed and
it appears that no one replied to him with any suggestions about how to handle
this issue.

Also I did a search on my system to see what was using ntp_gettime and only
found two things - ntptime and libc.  So this call is not very widely used. 
However I can understand your concern over maintaining ABI compatibility as an
old ntp installation would be broken by a glibc with this patch applied.  

Prior to discovering this patch I and other LinuxPPS users had been using a
modified version of timex.h that had the new *NANO* declarations added but that
did not change the data structure or use ->tai and this seemed to work OK.   So
it might be possible to only use the part of the patch that affects timex.h
since this would avoid the ABI issue but would fix the NANO related issues that
ntp would otherwise have. 

-- 


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9690

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