[time-nuts] An embedded NTP server

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Fri Dec 28 17:34:07 UTC 2012


On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 1:36 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
> It would be interesting to see what ntpd would do on a system with a very
> good clock and/or what you could do to the code/heuristics to take advantage
> of a stable clock.
>

I've read reports of people who have un-soldered the crystal from a
motherboard and replaced it with a connection to somethig much more
stable.  The result is a more stable clock adjustment but not a more
accurate NTP server.   The bottleneck is not the oscillator.  It is
the uncertiantly in the interrupt latency on the PPS.

If you want a much improved NTP server you need to build an external
nanosecond counter and then modify NTP and the OS to read this counter
rather than the internal one.    So this could not work on Windows or
any closed source OS.   Then you use a hardware latch to shapshot the
external counter when the PPS happens.    The current system does the
snapshot inside the interrupt handler, then sets a bit to indicate a
new sample is available, the captured count is read by the background
process.

Building a counter that runs at 1GHz is not to hard but connecting it
so the computer's OS can read it with very low latency is harder.
Maybe the counter is built on a PCI card?  It couldn't go on a USB
port

One idea that I like is to first get a large FPGA.  Then you load in a
"soft CPU" and then you run an OS and NTP on the soft CPU.   Inside
the softCPU the counter is implemented like it is in a real CPU but
you can add the ability for a PPS to "latch" it.  Basicaly you move
the interrupt handler to hardware.     The trick is if you can get
good enough performance out of the soft CPU?    There is some
intelectual property problems with some soft CPS but I'm pretty sure
there are free SPARC CPS you can use and SPARC is ideal for this as it
can run BSD Unix.
--

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California



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