Re: [PATCH v6 0/8] ptp: IEEE 1588 hardware clock support
From: Christian Riesch
Date: Thu Sep 30 2010 - 00:15:28 EST
Quoting Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxx>:
On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Christian Riesch wrote:
> > It implies clock tuning in userspace for a potential sub microsecond
> > accurate clock. The clock accuracy will be limited by user space
> > latencies and noise. You wont be able to discipline the system clock
> > accurately.
>
> Noise matters, latency doesn't.
Well put! That's why we need hardware support for PTP timestamping to reduce
the noise, but get along well with the clock servo that is steering
the PHC in
user space.
Even if I buy into the catch phrase above: User space is subject to noise
that the in kernel code is not. If you do the tuning over long intervals
then it hopefully averages out but it still causes jitter effects that
affects the degree of accuracy (or sync) that you can reach. And the noise
varies with the load on the system.
Yes and no. If you regard it as a control system: The latencies of the
operating system are a dead time in the control system. The sampling
time is quite large, one second, maybe around 100ms or 10ms in
telecommunication applications, but that is still large compared to
the latencies you expect to have in the operating system. Hence, this
latencies (=dead time) can be neglected and the important thing that
remains is the noise that you introduce in the measurements of the
time stamps, which is therefore done in hardware.
I admit that my short statement above is not completely correct, I
should have mentioned the rather large sampling time we are dealing
with here.
Christian
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