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
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
Kernel hacker speculated about this