Solved openntpd on a bhyve-hosting machine - why not just ntpd?

rwv37

rwv37

Due to wanting a certain closed-source program which only works on Linux, I intend to try to get a VM up and running, using bhyve. I know little about all this beyond vague stuff like "I know what a VM is", so I've been reading up on it. One of the things I've found is the FreeBSD Journal article "bhyve for the Linux and Windows users" on the FreeBSD Foundation's website. Its instructions include installing net/openntpd. It explains this as follows:

Briefly, OpenNTPD is a simple time daemon from the OpenBSD project. This keeps the host time from skewing. When a hypervisor is under extreme pressure from guest workloads, this can cause the regular system time to quickly get out of sync. OpenNTPD keeps time in check while ensuring your upstream time source is reporting the correct time using constraints over the HTTPS protocol.
Click to expand...

That's the only bit in the article explaining why I should install OpenNTPD. I don't know much about NTP either, so my initial reaction might be blatantly ignorant: "Isn't that just what ntpd does?"

I have been poking around the web a bit to try to get more information on this. I have found various other things describing benefits of using OpenNTPD instead of ntpd, but nothing that clearly explained to me why (presumably) ntpd can't just do what I (perhaps mis-) understand to be its job. So, it's not clear to me if the article is suggesting that OpenNTPD should be used instead of ntpd in this situation, or rather just that you should make sure you're using some NTP thingy (of which the author's favorite is OpenNTPD) to do the normal NTPD-thingy thing.
 
If all you need is an NTPD client, my opinion is openntpd is better than base ntpd.
Why? Again, my opinion, openntpd configuration is simpler, easier than base ntpd.
One can configure base ntpd as a client, but the config file gets interesting.
 
I forgot to mention: I'm already using ntpd as a client, so my choices here are not "Should I install OpenNTPD or ntpd"; rather, they're "Should I try to deal with this new-to-me OpenNTPD, while I am already trying to deal with several other new-to-me things (e.g. bhyve), or can I just (at least for the time being) continue using ntpd".
 
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