oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/propolis
want policy for handling time drift between machines in migration
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 270
- Forks
- 42
- Avg merge
- 4d 5h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 6
Description
Part of ongoing work for #337
One aspect of handling time across live migrations is accounting for the delta between reading the timing data on the source side and writing out the time data on the destination side. In this step on the destination, the current implementation of #337 makes calculations based on the wall clock times of both machines. One extremely load-bearing assumption in using wall clocks to find the time delta is assuming that NTP is working properly, and that both machines' wall clocks are synchronized.
In my testing so far on a lab cluster, I have observed negative migration deltas (<2000 usecs) between the source read and the target receipt of the data. My current implementation throws up its hands if it sees a negative delta. The lab machine cluster I'm using uses a public NTP server (see also: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/meta/issues/146), and in production we will have a local NTP server with presumably a much tighter window for the wall clocks.
I'm still considering how to handle this properly (without somehow re-implementing NTP). My initial thought for now is to clamp any negative deltas perceived to 0 and log a warning if we see such a delta. This is incomplete, as a positive delta can also be far off. I want to do some more thinking about this, and I also want to do some exploration here about how what monitoring we will have for verifying NTP is working elsewhere in the software stack.
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading the ongoing migration work in #337 and the implementation that calculates timing data between the source and destination. Investigate how wall-clock deltas and NTP assumptions affect negative or unexpectedly large values. Done means agreeing on a policy for these deltas and determining how warnings or monitoring should verify clock behavior.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- operating-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100