[ntp:questions] Performance estimation

[Dan Drown]

Quoting David Taylor:
> The clock on a Raspberry Pi ranges from 700 to 1500 MHz, so clock
> resolution is in the nanosecond range.  There is mention of 250 MHz as
> well, which would be 4 nanoseconds.  It would be nice to see numbers
> which distinguish a little better than earlier RPi is "3" and more
> recent ones are "1"!

The system's time (kernel "clocksource") on the RPI is actually not  
running at the same speed as the CPU clock.

 From dmesg: arch_timer: cp15 timer(s) running at 19.20MHz (phys).

This gives you around 52ns of resolution.  I believe it's the same on  
all the rpi models.

> I would also like to see whether the characteristics of the GPS and its
> location make a measurable difference to the RPi's timekeeping.  For
> example: is it better to have a GPS with 3 service capability at a
> location where the signal is poor, or is it masked by the RPi's
> performance?  All this with kernel-mode PPS.

What I've used for this is a percentile of offsets.  Looking at the 1%  
and 99% values on a histogram is an estimate of the system's stability.

For instance (not an rpi):  
https://dan.drown.org/cheese/run3/offset-histogram.png

So from that graph, I can say that 98% of the time, the system clock  
is within +/-80ns of the PPS.

I believe you're using ntpd, and my code to generate that graph from  
ntpd logs is here: https://github.com/ddrown/chrony-graph/tree/ntpd


Quoting William Unruh:
> The question then is how rapidly the system can respond to an
> interrupt,. This at least used to be of the order of a microsecond.
> Also, how logd does it take to read the clock with the kernel gettime
> routines. They all limit the accuracy of your clock using gps refclock
> (and also how long the wire is between the gps unit and the computer)

On different ARM hardware (beaglebone black), I've measured interrupt latency:

https://blog.dan.drown.org/content/images/2014/Dec/interrupt-latency.png

I'd expect the rpi to have a similar magnitude.  Somewhere around  
+10us delay and 1us jitter.