ntpd-rs

Ubuntu's rollout of a Rust-based coreutils replacement had a bug [0] that, among other things, broke automatic updates. and the bug was...not subtle, either. it just silently ignored the documented behavior of `date -r` (printing the modtime of a file) [1, 2] as a time synchronization nerd, I've been following ntpd-rs's development, and tested it out as a possible replacement for Chrony. my overall impression is that like rust-coreutils, it's a well-intentioned project but not ready for prime-time, certainly not at the level of "installed by default on Ubuntu" (even in a non-LTS release) for example, there's an issue that's been open for ~9 months about logging being unnecessarily verbose, and flooding the system journal [3]. and an issue titled "implement new algorithm" opened by one of the core contributors, with zero description or det

I would encourage you to take a look at some of our testing data and an explanation of our algorithm in our repository (https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/tree/main/docs/a...). I think we are very much in spitting distance of Chrony in terms of synchronization performance, sometimes even beating Chrony. But we’d love for more people to try our algorithm in their infrastructure and report back. The more data the better.

In our internal testing we are very close to Chrony with our synchronization performance, some of our testing data and an explanation of our algorithm is published in our repository: https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/tree/main/docs/a... Given the amount of testing we (and other parties) have done, and given the strong theoretical foundation of our algorithm I’m pretty confident we’d do well in many production environments. If you do find any performance issues though, we’d love to hear about them!

This work is the NTP client, with server promised later. https://github.com/memorysafety/ntpd-rs

There is a list of NTP vulnerabilities in this article. If you're interested in a more secure NTP client we've been building one: https://github.com/memorysafety/ntpd-rs Server functionality and NTS support is on the way.