Project Status: future plans & applicability to data-center use today

[azet]

Hi,

I really apprechiated this project as it was announced at FOSDEM some years back and followed up on it semi-regularly. Pretty much all FOSS NTP/PTP projects suck by themselves and this seemed to provide a solid alternative: modular, written by someone that is familiar with precise time keeping and an established kernel developer. What struck me was the design included different parts just like some commercial PTP products would: grandmaster, time clients, distributors etc. - loved it as a fellow time nut.

But i see the project has been idle for a while with the last commits some 9 years ago. Some parts that were planned seemed to have never been implemented. While recently searching for the optimal software to run as a data-center stratum 1-2 server I thought about ntimed, but am not so sure about it's usability as is.

Are you considering it a "finished product" and as such isn't being worked on anymore? Is there no more funding or private interest? The Open Compute Project has recently taken up a sub programme to develop data-center time keeping tools, from time-cards that go into OCP servers to grandmaster clocks with GNSS and rubidium clocks as holdover for Sat. outages or jamming as well as complicated distribution proposals for sub-microsecond timing like white-rabbit. There even seem to be already commercially available implementations apart from what cloud providers have built and use. But coincidentally that programme seemed to mainly attract physicists to off-load their individual obsessions and part-time projects. while some have really good universal applicability, some are rather obscure and will probably never find use, even in telco scenarios outside physics labs. The other group of participants seems to be vendors already invested in the market: producing chips containing reference time sources like rubidium clocks for aerospace, satellite or military use in the past - now as OCP contributors or new optical clocks (this was really interesting and new to me [1]).

To get to the point (finally, I know, I digress): I was thinking of using their open-time server or open time card at some point. ntimed still seems like a valid choice for multiple applications around a data-center. Can you provide any insight into the project status or what I should consider as an alternative if you feel ntimed isn't the way to go?

Thanks in advance, and I'm sorry if an issue like this had been opened already, I searched in the github issues of this project but couldn't find one that fit.

all the best,
Aaron / azet

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFEFyJGqHlc&list=PLAG-eekRQBSgFYdbkVVmSbOxCX9acFh3g&index=5