[ntp:questions] drift modeling question

David Woolley david at ex.djwhome.demon.co.uk.invalid
Sun Jul 13 11:34:17 UTC 2008


Hal Murray wrote:
> 
> Most PCs have 2 xtals.  One at 14.xxx MHz (cheap, 4X color burst)
> that drives the CPU and most motherboard logic through a magic clock
> generator (PLL) chip, and another that is a 32 KHz watch crystal for
> keeping time when the CPU is off.  The latter also makes interrupts
> for the scheduler.

Historically interrupts from the 32kHz clock have not been used, except, 
possibly, in powered down states to initiate a restart from suspend or 
hibernate.  It is possible that has changed very recently, but they 
certainly weren't used historically.

> 
> I had the temperature probe on the 14 MHz xtal.  It didn't work very well.
> 
> I was assuming that the system used something like a cycle counter
> (TSC) for timekeeping.  That has troubles in multi-CPU systems.

I think the most common way of doing timekeeping at the 1ms and higher 
level is to use the counter timer, which is driven from a signal divided 
down to approximately 1MHz.  TSC is mainly used to interpolate between 
ticks or to detect missed ticks.

> The code I was actually running used the timer interrupts for
> timekeeping and the TSC to interpolate between ticks.

but note that the timer interrupts are not based on the 32kHz 
oscillator, in the typical system.




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