[ntp:questions] Dispaying nanoseconds
David L. Mills
mills at udel.edu
Fri Feb 16 18:00:12 UTC 2007
Richard,
The interpretatino of precision has persisted for the life of the NTPv4
implementation. Precision <is> the smallest difference in the time the
clock can represent. While it might appear that the smallest difference
is the resolution, the operating system call cannot truthfull represent
differences less than the time it takes to read the clock.
Onced upon a time when the clock resolution was in the milliseconds and
the time to read the clock was 42 microseconds, the difference between
resolution and precision wasn't really significant. However, no the
potential resolution is less than a nanosecond and the time to read the
clock several hundred nanoseconds and the difference is critical.
Dave
Richard B. gilbert wrote:
> mills at udel.edu wrote:
>
>> Rune,
>>
>> The vanilla ntptime shows precision, but it really should say
>> resolution. By definition, precision is the time taken to read the
>> system clock, ranging from 42 microseconds in a SPARC IPC to 500
>> nanoseconds in a Sun Blade 1500.
>>
>> Dave
>
>
> Dave,
>
> That appears inconsistent with other NTP usage of precision, at least as
> I've understood it. My understanding was that precision was the
> smallest difference in time that the clock could represent; e.g. the
> value of the least significant bit.
>
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