F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Tue Jul 3 09:03:10 UTC 2012

DST is a time-zone specific phenomenon.

Leap seconds are changes to the actual core time. UTC moves with leap seconds.

It doesn't move with DST or other timezone weirdnesses.

The system clock needs to be UTC, not UTC ± some offset stuck somewhere that keeps some form of running tally of the current leap second offset since the epoch.

Owen

On Jul 3, 2012, at 1:54 AM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

> 
> Steven Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu> writes:
>> See
>> http://landslidecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/linuxs-leap-second-deadlocks.html
> 
> Maybe we should stop wrenching the poor system time back and forth.  We
> no longer add or subtract daylight savings time (or timezones) to the
> kernel time, why do we do it with leapseconds?  We should really move
> the leapseconds correction into the display routines like DST and
> timezones already are.  I believe the Olson time code already has ifdefs
> for doing this.  I wonder why the system's internal time isn't run that
> way.
> 
> -wolfgang
> -- 
> g+:  https://plus.google.com/114566345864337108516/about
> 