*Request For Feedback*: TimeOwner in phosphor-timemanager

[Kun Yi]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 7:02 AM vishwa <vishwa at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> Hello community,
>
> Would be really great if there is any feedback on this.
>
> Have a happy holidays !!
>
> !! Vishwa !!
> On 12/11/19 3:24 PM, vishwa wrote:
>
> On 12/11/19 12:17 AM, Pine, Kathryn ElaineX wrote:
>
> >* Do we need this going forward ?*: I am being asked by UX team about
> the need of this and I mentioned I would get the community feedback on
> this. Although, I feel this level of granularity gives control over how we
> can manage time, it would not justify the complexity if the customers don't
> appreciate it. Removing the TimeOwner would make the code a lot simpler.
>
> Hi,
>
>
>
> I am coming from the UX side of how we set the date time settings page up
> for phosphor-webui downstream recently. We switched our page to use
> Redfish, here’s how ours is set up now:
>
>
>
> There is no longer a “time owner” and the setting is either:
>
> NTPEnabled: true or false
>
> If false, we are not allowing the user to set the time, because the BMC is
> synching from the host time and therefore any settings we made to the time
> on the BMC would be overwritten.
>
> If true, we use the NTP server(s) the user provides.
>
>
>
> We are testing this currently.
>
>
> Hi, Thank you for the response. From what I interpreted:
>
> - TimeOwner is not settable via GUI
> - Irrespective of NTP setting, the user is not allowed to set the time on
> BMC
> - BMC is syncing the time from Host.
>    - This means, the current TimeOwner is "Host" and NTP is off. Is that
> being set as default ?
>
> I am requesting for feedback from the community on the need of TimeOwner
> feature that we have in Settings and timemanager code.
>
> !! Vishwa !!
>
> My 2cents here along with a few questions:
- how does the current time manager interact with systemd-timesyncd?
- From my experience, BMC time can drift a lot easily and it is more useful
to have the BMC time synced externally
- Whether NTP or host time is preferred should be left to the platform
designer to decide
- sounds like it would be more straightforward to have the 'Owner' reflect
one time source: NTP/IPMI/Redfish

-- 
Regards,
Kun
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