Canonical’s vice president of engineering and technical lead of the Ubuntu project, Jon Seager, has announced plans to integrate an NTP server into the fall release of Ubuntu 26.10. The NTP server, called ntpd-rs, is written in Rust and is already being used in the Let’s Encrypt certification authority infrastructure. This move is part of an initiative to enhance the quality of the system environment by providing software that prioritizes security, reliability, and correctness from the beginning.
As part of this initiative, Canonical is considering replacing the zlib library with zlib-rs and using the Sequoia package instead of GnuPG in the APT package manager. The ntpd-rs package will serve as both a time synchronization server and client, aiming to replace the current packages like chrony, linuxptp, and potentially gpsd. The plan is to introduce the current version of ntpd-rs into the Ubuntu 26.10 repository for testing purposes, with the goal of making it the default time synchronization tool in Ubuntu 27.04.
The ntpd-rs project is developed by the Trifecta Tech Foundation, which also created the sudo-rs utility that is already integrated into Ubuntu. Canonical will be funding the development of new features and security enhancements for ntpd-rs. The project aims to incorporate developments from the Statime project, which focuses on implementing the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) in Rust. This integration will enable ntpd-rs to support multiple time synchronization protocols and potentially replace linuxptp as well.
Future features to be implemented in ntpd-rs include support for gPTP and CSPTP protocols, integration of gpsd IP socket, multi-threaded operation of NTP servers, multi-homed mode support, creation of isolation profiles based on AppArmor and seccomp, testing and performance evaluation tools, improvements to logging and configuration, and enhancement of the ntp-cli utility.
In addition to collaborating with the Trifecta Tech Foundation, Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a gold member, further highlighting its commitment to incorporating Rust-based technologies into the Ubuntu ecosystem.