freebsd announce - Dec 2010 - Foundation Funds last project for 2010!

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Julien Ridoux and 
Darryl Veitch at the University of Melbourne have been awarded a grant 
to implement support of feed-forward clock synchronization algorithms.

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is widely used for synchronization over 
the network and the ntpd daemon is the current reference synchronization 
algorithm. The system clock in FreeBSD is currently designed with ntpd 
in mind, leading to strong feedback coupling between the kernel and the 
synchronization daemon.

The RADclock ( http://www.cubinlab.ee.unimelb.edu.au/radclock/ ) is an 
example of an alternative class of synchronization algorithms based on 
feed-forward principles. This project will provide the core support for 
feed-forward algorithms, so that alternatives to ntpd can be developed 
and tested. The central motivation for this is the strong potential of 
such approaches for highly robust and accurate synchronization.

Beyond this, virtualization is one of the next major challenges faced by 
time keeping systems. The current feedback synchronization model is 
complex and introduces its own dynamics, an approach that is not suited 
to the requirements of virtualization. Feed-forward based 
synchronization offers a cleaner and simpler approach, which is capable 
of providing accurate time keeping over live migration of virtual machines.

This project will conclude in March 2011.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation