Meinberg Products Not Affected by 'gpsd' Week Number Bug
Users of Meinberg’s various synchronization products will perhaps be aware that many of Meinberg systems use GPS receiver technology and may therefore be concerned about recent news reports about a bug that will imminently affect some GPS-based devices on October 24, 2021.
Meinberg assures that no Meinberg devices whatsoever will be affected by this problem.
The issue is the result of a bug in the program gpsd
, which our products do not use.
gpsd
is a program known as a daemon, a task that runs in the background of numerous devices powered by Unix-type operating systems such as Linux.
The specific purpose of gpsd
is to fetch data from GPS and GNSS receivers attached or built-in to a device such as a satellite navigation device
to enable the device’s other software (such as mapping software) to process the location data.
The gpsd
bug in question was fixed in July 2021 and most internet-capable devices running standardized OSs such as Linux or Android variants
should have received corresponding patches through OS updates. However, there are many GPS-based devices “in the wild” that will be affected by this bug.
Some devices have had patches rolled out and will need to be updated manually, other devices may no longer be supported and may never receive patches.
Meinberg has provided support and contributions to the gpsd
project in the past as part of their longstanding support of and commitment
to the FOSS community, and gpsd
is a valuable project maintained by generous volunteers that forms the backbone of many navigation devices
used in travel, transportation, and leisure today. Meinberg products themselves, however, use a different, proprietary GPS receiver interface solution
that was developed in-house and is better suited to our time synchronization needs.
References
- GPSD time will jump back 1024 weeks at after week=2180 (23-October-2021) (Mailing List Archive)
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gpsd-users/2021-07/msg00066.html
- GPSD time will jump back 1024 weeks at after week=2180 (23-October-2021) (Gitlab Issue)
https://gitlab.com/gpsd/gpsd/-/issues/144#note_689396224
- If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/19/gpsd_bug_reset/
— Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki@meinberg.de, last updated 2021-10-22