Skip to content

Code structure

This document gives a high-level overview of the structure of ntpd-rs.

Crates

ntpd-rs is split into several crates with three goals in mind:

  • Split the logic of protocol handling from the details around asynchronous network handling
  • Split custom servers needed purely for integration testing from the main codebase
  • Limit the scopes where we use unsafe code, ensuring that it is more straightforward to verify.

The main ntp-proto and ntpd crates are set up such that neither contains any unsafe code. Unsafe code is limited to the (external) timestamped-socket and clock-steering crates, which are purposefully kept small and only offer a safe API.

ntp-proto

The ntp-proto crate contains the main NTP protocol implementation. It implements: - Serialization and deserialization of the on-wire protocol. - Packet handling decision logic of the source. - Measurement logic of the source, including the per-source filtering. - Clock selection, combination and steering algorithms.

This crate only implements the decision and processing logic. It does not perform the actual communication, nor does it do any of the handling needed to ensure that source and steering logic is regularly called.

timestamped-socket

The timestamped-socket crate provides an async interface to the Linux kernel's kernel-level network timestamping functionality. It wraps the system calls for configuring kernel-level timestamping and for retrieving the actual timestamps. Touching the network layer uses libc and is inherently unsafe.

clock-steering

The clock-steering crate wraps the system calls needed for controlling the system clock. Touching the system clock uses libc and is inherently unsafe.

ntpd

The ntpd crate contains the code for all three end-user binaries that our project produces. This includes

  • ntp-daemon (in ntpd/src/daemon)
  • ntp-ctl (in ntpd/src/ctl.rs)
  • ntp-metrics-exporter (in ntpd/src/metrics)

Each of these should mostly contain the actual execution code that calls each of the previously mentioned crates when required.

NTP daemon startup and operating sequence.

This section provides a high-level overview of the operation of the NTP daemon, and how its various tasks are set up, configured and communicate.

Upon startup, the daemon first parses any given command line arguments and uses these arguments to set up an initial logging system. This early setup of logging is done to ensure that during reading and parsing of the configuration files the logging system is available to expose information on errors.

Immediately after, further configuration is read from file and used to generate the definitive logging system. At this point, the main configuration steps are completed, and the combined command line and file base configuration is used to set up at least these kinds of tasks: - The main clock steering task. - One source task per configured source (remote server). - One server task per configured interface on which to serve time. - One task for exposing state for observability. - One task for dynamic configuration changes.

Source tasks

The daemon runs a single source task per configured source. This task is responsible for managing the network connection with that specific source, sending the poll message to start a clock difference measurement, handling the response, and doing an initial filtering step over the measurements.

The main loop of the source waits on 3 futures concurrently: - A timer, which triggers sending a new poll message. - The network socket, receiving a packet here triggers packet processing and measurement filtering. - A configuration channel, receiving configuration changes.

Should any of these events happen, after handling it the source task then sends an updated version of the sections of its state needed for clock steering to the main clock steering task.

Server task

The daemon runs a single task per interface on which NTP packets are served (where the any (0.0.0.0) interface counts as a single interface). This task is responsible for managing the socket for that interface, reading messages and providing the proper server responses.

The main loop of the server waits on 2 futures concurrently: - The network socket - A channel providing synchronization state updates

Clock steering task

The clock steering task listens for the messages from the sources with their updated state. It keeps a local copy of the last received state from each source, and also the state of the clock steering algorithm. Some (but not all) updates from a source indicate that it now has some new measurement data available. If this happens, the clock steering task triggers a clock algorithm update.

Observability task

The observability task is responsible for handling external requests for insight into the daemon's state. It creates and manages a UNIX socket which can be queried for information on the state of the daemon.

Once an external program opens a connection to the UNIX socket, the observation daemon makes a copy of the state of all the sources and of the clock steering algorithm (it has access to these through a RwLock shared with the clock steering task). It then uses this to generate a JSON bytestream with information, which it then writes to the connection. Immediately afterwards, the entire connection is closed.

Note that it never reads from any opened connection on the socket. This is on purpose, as it limits the amount of attack surface exposed by this task.

Configuration task

The configuration task changes configuration dynamically at runtime. The task listens to a socket for new configuration changes. The ntp-ctl executable is an example of how to interact with this socket.

Because this task reads from its socket, it is advised to restrict the permissions on this socket.