[LinuxPPS] push sys/timepps.h into glibc ?

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday, July 13, 2011 06:59:07 AM Miroslav Lichvar wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 03:11:50PM +0200, Vitezslav Samel wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 09:19:09AM -0700, Hal V. Engel wrote:
> > > So back to the more important question.  How is this going to be made
> > > available to distro and users?
> > > 
> >   I think we should push it into glibc. Or?
> 
> Or make a pps-tools package. That's what I'm trying to do in Fedora.
> 
> The trouble with the timepps.h file is that it's not just header, it
> also contains the actual code. When a new feature from the API is
> implemented, all clients need to be recompiled. I think the proper way
> would be to move the code to a pps library and require the clients to
> use -lpps.

A few days ago I opened a bug report about this for Gentoo.  Less than 24 
hours later a package for this was in portage and the ntp ebuild was changed 
to require the pps-tools package if use=parse-clocks is set.  For gentoo and 
perhaps other source based distros this should work nicely but I agree that 
there are likely to be issues for non-source based distros.

With the Linux kernel support maturing I think the focus needs to shift to 
making this easy for distros and then users to implement.  At this stage both 
are problematic in part because a major piece of the puzzel is hard to find and 
obscure.

Gentoo is probably one of the better distros right now for setting up a PPS 
clock since all you have to do is configure and build the kernel, build ntp 
with use=parse-clocks, then configure ntp to use your clock.  These are all 
fairly easy to do.  What is missing still is hooks in the init system to 
create the line disipline for the device and the udev hooks for creating the 
symlinks to the device(s).  These must still be done by hand from scratch.

About a year and a half ago I played around a little with this stuff on an 
OpenSuSE machine and they actually had the beginings of a YAST GUI for setting 
up the clock (creating entries in the ntp.conf file) and symlinks but it was 
not functional and was definitely a work in progress.  It looked to me like it 
might have come close to working for a type 22 clock (PPS only) if the kernel 
had PPS support which it did not.  I don't know if this has progressed since 
that time and I have no idea what this will look like in OpenSuSE 12.1 later 
this year.  At some point for distros like OpenSuSE and Ubuntu it would be 
nice if they had GUIs for setting up ntp that would allow users to setup 
refclocks in an easy non-technical way.  It will probably be a long time 
before this happens however.  

Right now this is even somewhat difficult for those who are trying to put the 
basic pieces together for the distros.  One thing that needs to happen sooner 
rather than later is to get the pps-tools stuff into some type of formalized 
package and get that hosted someplace where it is easy to find.

Hal
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