[ntp:questions] Re: ntpd PLL and clock overshoot

David Woolley david at djwhome.demon.co.uk
Mon Oct 16 20:57:54 UTC 2006


In article <egr25e$kd3$1 at scrotar.nss.udel.edu>,
David L. Mills <mills at udel.edu> wrote:

> You are victim of faulty engineering intuition. See Chapter 4 in The 
> Book. See the graphs therein showing the response to initial 

Don't have easy access to the book, but looking at the PDF version
of NTP Clock Discipline Principles, dated 2004-08-24, the case we are
discussing here starts in state FSET, gets a type 0 event and
goes to TSET, with no side effects, then gets another type 0 event and
transitions to state SYNC, resetting the stepout timer and starting
to feed the semi-linear part of the control loop.  It does this because
the initial error is only 90ms and because there is an ntp.drift
file.

That effectively short circuits the state machine logic after only one
sample, so the start up behaviour is completely dominated by the PLL/FLL.

The person reporting the symptom knows he is using an accurate radio
clock and probably believes that the true phase noise is 100 microseconds
or less, but actually sees the phase take significant time to reach zero
error and then proceed to overshoot to 9ms in the other direction.

It looks to me that the only way that he is going to get fast convergence
under these conditions is by tinkering the step limit to 1ms or less
(better: several standard deviations larger than the expected phase
noise).  However tinkering is discouraged and sometimes causes other
features to be turned off.

His other option, I suppose, is to deliberately set the clock wrongly
so that it is guaranteed to be out by more than 128ms.

Basically, you only get the good performance documented in the PDF file
if the initial error is either negligible, or is quite large.

> Your scenario where the operator slings the frequency as the response 
> crosses zero is equivalent to a frequency-lock model which disregards 
> the initial phase error. This is in fact the model for the initial 
> frequency estimate when the frequency file has not yet been created. 

That is a transition from zero frequency correction to the estimated
required correction.  The scenario I was considering was a transition from
a maximum (positive or negative) correction to the nominal value.

By the way, looking at the state diagram in that PDF file, I can only make
sense of it if I assume that the arcs from SYNC for events 1 and 2 have 
had their labels mixed up.




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