NTP Servers - Should a reboot be required?

[Lei YU]

On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 6:19 AM ja az <jandraara at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> During the Demo and Retrospective call last week, the UI design team
> showed the current proposals for the Date and Time Settings panels. As
> it stands, the backend has been developed in way such that any changes
> in the synchronized NTP servers would require the host to be off in
> order for the changes to go into effect. If the host is not off, a
> reboot is required. And so, the UI designs were created to represent
> this. When they were shown last week, there was hesitation regarding
> the need for a reboot; some gave the example of changing the date on
> their laptop and how that doesn’t require a reboot.
>
> Are there resources to modify the backend so that a reboot is not
> required? Is that possible even if there were resources?

This is really a good question.
In OpenBMC's time manager, a requirement is that time setting changes shall
not be applied until host is off, see [special-note-on-host-on][1]

@Vishwa could you kindly help to describe the reason (or history) of the
requirement?

[1]: https://github.com/openbmc/phosphor-time-manager#special-note-on-host-on