Google shared some details about how they do leap smearing and the adjustments were smeared over a long enough time to be small enough to not affect their applications. They've been doing this for a while with no ill effects AFAIK. I'm aware of other people patching ntpd to do similar stuff as well.

If you can get the smear to be gentle enough to not affect your apps, it's a nice workaround for the general problem. There's just so many components running inside a modern infrastructure, and it's hard to get them all to behave correctly during a traditional 61-second-minute leap second transition.

And that 2012 leap second linux kernel bug was pretty epic. AFAIK, people who are smearing didn't experience it.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-l...