Kernel Developers Tracking Down New Year's Eve Leap Second Issue
A few server admins had reported Linux crashes right at the New Year's Eve countdown. Linux developers are currently investigating if they had anything to do with the leap second phenomenon.
The Linux admins who experienced the crashes started a thread to that effect on the slashdot.org community site. In response, developer Linas Vepstas pulled together a summary of the issue on the Kernel mailing list lkml.org.
According to Vepstas, the 53 reported hard crashes at or near midnight December 31 2008 had a few things in common. In all cases the systems were not pingable and power-off cold reboots were required to get them back to normal working conditions. There were no syslog error messages, no kernel oopses and no core dumps.
The likely suspect was the worldwide coordinated leap second required to get atomic clocks back in synch with the earth's orbit. It turns out the last minute of 2008 was actually 61 seconds long. Even the New York Times had forewarned about it.
Network Time Protocol (NTP) clocks needed to bump their times by this second, the first time since 2005. Vepstas suspects that this jump prompted a race condition in the kernel that led to the Linux crashes.
The lkml.org mailing list is currently discussing if and how the crash condition can be reproduced, how Linux can deal with it in the future and what effect leap seconds will have on the UNIX time calculation.
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
Kernel hacker speculated about this