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Eric S. Raymond authored
This is potentially a big deal for platforms with a POSIX-conformant clock_settime(2) that takes a timespec. Before, when a time step was calculated, it was always rounded to microseconds to be passed to settimeofday(2). Now, precision down to nanoseconds is passed through ntp_set_tod() to be used by clock_settime(2) if the platform has it, for a potential gain of up to 10**3 in stepping accuracy. Today few time sources actually deliver with that accuracy, but it is reasonable to expect lesser gains to the exact extent that clock_gettime(2) and primary time sources are capable of delivering sub-microsecond accuracy - in particular for GPSDOs, which often deliver in the 100ns range, and dedicated time receivers which may reach 50ns accuracy. We may thus expect an order of magnitude or more accuracy improvement from this change with real hardware.
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