On most of our platforms, the time of day is preserved on the machine
in a battery backed up real time clock chip. Said chip is typically
read and reset in a given port's inittodr/resettodr code.

Typical battery backed RTC chips store the time to a precision of
one second, though they are often more accurate than that in that
their drift is relatively small over short periods.

Now, when we read or reset the clock in inittodr/resettodr, we are
typically ignoring the fact that the RTC chips tick but once a second,
and we treat the time as equally accurate across the entire second. We
might read the RTC chip as saying 12:00:00 .1 seconds before it would
read 12:00:01, but we'll set the time to 12:00:00 anyway.

In days of yore, this was fine, but in a modern NTPized world, this
can cause trouble. Machines now keep far better time than one second
accuracy, and when you sleep and wake up a machine or reboot it, the
system can gain or lose nearly a second.

I'd like to propose that on most ports, we spin in inittodr(9) waiting
for the next second to tick over and setting the clock exactly then,
and that in resettodr(9) we do a brief calculation of when the next
second will tick, and wait until then to set the RTC.

This has the disadvantage of adding up to a 1 second delay in machine
pauses, boots, shutdowns, etc, but it will make timekeeping much
better.

Opinions?

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com