[ntp:questions] Allan deviation survey

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Thu Sep 16 19:35:41 UTC 2010


Miroslav,

I reached out to find nine NTP servers with known good pedigree, except 
NIST. I found precissions ranging from -19 to -22, bu nothing better. 
These included Sun UltraSPARC, Sun Blade, Intel dual-core, Intel Pentium 
and ia64. They were running Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 6.1 and 8.0, SunOS 5.10 
and 5.11, and HP-UX 11.31. So far as I know, they are all running ntpd 
and all measure the precision using the get_systime() routine. Note 
there is quite a bit more than the syscall in that routine, as it 
involves normalizing to NTP timestamp format and fuzzing the low-order 
bits. That last requires calling the Unix random() routine. If you can 
do all that in 119 ns, you have a screamer.

Dave

Miroslav Lichvar wrote:

>On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 01:23:28AM +0000, David L. Mills wrote:
>  
>
>>The fastest machine I can find on campus has precision -22, or about
>>230 ns. Then, I peeked at time.nist.gov, which is actually three
>>machines behind a load leveler. It reports to be an i386 running
>>FreeBSD 61. Are you ready for this? It reports precision -29 or 1.9
>>ns! I'm rather suspiciousabout that number. What  processor and
>>operating system are you using. What is the precision reported by
>>ntpd?
>>    
>>
>
>The processor is 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 with two cores and it's running
>Linux 2.6.35. The precision reported by ntpd is -23.
>
>As I have said, this is with the tsc clocksource. Kernel uses tsc only
>when it's reliable and this seems to depend on used hardware
>combination. When switched to hpet clocksource, the precision is 480
>ns and with acpi_pm clocksource it's 1900 ns.
>
>To give you an idea what would be the precision with tsc if there was
>no system overhead, try this program:
>
>#include <stdio.h>
>#include <sys/time.h>
>
>#define rdtsc(val) \
>__asm__ __volatile__("rdtsc" : "=a" (val) : : "edx")
>#define NUM 1000000
>
>int main() {
>	int a, b, i;
>	struct timeval tv1, tv2;
>	gettimeofday(&tv1, NULL);
>	gettimeofday(&tv1, NULL);
>	rdtsc(a);
>	for (i = 0; i < NUM; i++)
>		rdtsc(b);
>	gettimeofday(&tv2, NULL);
>	i = (tv2.tv_sec - tv1.tv_sec) * 1000000 + tv2.tv_usec - tv1.tv_usec;
>	printf("%f MHz, rdtsc: %f nanoseconds, %f cycles\n",
>			(double)(b - a) / i,
>			(double)i * 1000 / NUM,
>			(double)(b - a) / NUM);
>	return 0;
>}
>
>The dual-core Core 2 CPU:
>2394.053013 MHz, rdtsc: 28.012000 nanoseconds, 67.062213 cycles
>
>A single-core Athlon 64:
>2000.448523 MHz, rdtsc: 3.351000 nanoseconds, 6.703503 cycles
>
>  
>




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