Legacy systems
One of the issues often discussed in the light of time sync requirements for software applications coming from the MiFID II and NMS CAT regulations is the one of legacy systems. There are two parts to this.
First is legacy applications, being applications which do not support the capture of timestamps with the required granularity. The problem lies either with their design (simply put, fields, structures and protocols with no room for nanosecond or even microsecond resolution), or with the technology they use (older Java versions for example). Both of these issues can be remedied with some development and migration effort. Another issue is the accuracy and non-uniformity of timestamps retrieved from the operating system - this is not easily fixed, as it is mostly out of the developers' control. In non-virtualised systems, clock_gettime() or even gettimeofday() usually meet the regulatory requirements. I will not discuss their performance here, but that is not to say that they have no effect. For older Java applications, one can use JNI to call these functions, at the cost of even greater call latency.
The second part is legacy operating systems, and this post is about one of them: Solaris 10.
