On 07/02/2012 09:24 AM, Peter Eckel wrote:
> On the other hand I'm a bit surprised that the problems were
> comparably few - actually there is a time '01:59:60' for one second,
> and any plausibility check I've ever seen assumes that minutes and
> seconds are in the range from 0..59. Wrongly, it seems.
As far as I've been able to understand it, the problem had nothing to do
with validity checks or other date handling code. The problem was
simply a bug in the API provided by the Linux kernel for notification of
leap seconds. The kernel messed up some internal data that led to
futexes going nuts. The affected programs weren't handling dates
poorly, they were just threaded applications.
> Apparently Google uses an approach that looks much less risky to me -
> they use a time window over which they 'smear' the leap second by
> making their time servers lie about the time for a while, making it
> pass a little bit slower. That way they avoid the unlucky 61st second
> and still advance the clocks within a reasonable time.
Google's approach was reliable by chance. They used a different kernel
API to adjust the clock, and that one didn't break futexes.
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