>It always struck me that allowing leap seconds to wrench the system's
>time was a bit like keeping the kernel time in local-wall-time and
>then pulling some elaborate slight of hand during the
>daylight-savings-time transitions.


>I recall reading Bernstein's proposals to keep the kernel time in
>purely monotonically increasing seconds and simply using the Olson
>time-printing code in libc in its other mode where is would add the
>leap seconds in only at time display time.  Are there any technical
>gotcha's that would bite one in the butt if the leap seconds were
>moved out of the kernel's time?

My recollection isx that  POSIX rules forbids Bernstein's idea.

Quite apart from that, it's a *dumb* idea.

The kernel time would be about 30 seconds out form wall time, and will
continue to drift further out of step, as (given the slowdown in
rotation fo the Earth) TAI and UTC slowly diverge.  There is a
nonzero user community where this is absolutely unacceptable.

Even worse (from similar perspectives) is that the absolute value of
the difference between TAI and UTC changes, over time, as the relevant
body decides to insert new leap-seconds. That means creating and
installing new timzeone files, with the updated leap-second info,
on the order of twice a year.

That is ... not a good fit with the observed interval between minor
releases of NetBSD.