[time-nuts] Cheap jitter measurements
Hal Murray
hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Sun Apr 8 17:56:24 EDT 2018
kb8tq at n1k.org said:
> In both cases (pulse in and pulse out) the first step is to ask NTP “when
> was that?”. You still have a pretty big chunk of NTP in the middle of the
> process …. If NTP only “knows” what is happening (or can control what is
> happening) to +/- 300 ns. The guts of your data will be limited to the
> same 300 ns.
NTP itself doesn't actually do any timing measurements. That is done by the
OS.
I'm not familiar with Windows. All my OS comments apply to Linux and *BSD.
Windows is probably similar is most respects but may be missing details.
The system clock runs off the CPU crystal. The kernel has a knob for fine
tuning the clock speed. There is another knob that says bump the clock speed
a bit (500 PPM) long enough to adjust the time by X seconds. ntpd uses both.
[Many years ago, most kernels used an interrupt from the battery backed clock
(RTC or TOY) for the main timing and interpolated using the CPU clock.]
The kernel can capture a time stamp on a PPS pulse and on packet arrivals. I
don't know of anything similar for packet departure.
The kernel can support more than one PPS so you could feed a GPSDO in on one
for NTP and use another for general timing measurements. Those measurements
are using the kernel clock as a reference. You can turn ntpd off so the
system time will have more long term drift but less short term wobble as ntpd
corrects for errors.]
I don't know of a good way to get a pulse out at a specified time. You can
measure the time that user code sends a pulse out and setup a timer to go off
every second. I don't know how to adjust or specify the offset from
timer-going-off to system clock ticking to another second.
The Linux kernel PPS code has an option to send a pulse out when one comes
in. I haven't played with it. I think it could help with measuring the
interrupt response delays.
tvb: If I send you some data, can you turn it into pretty graphs?
--
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