[ntp:questions] high precision tracking: trying to understand sudden jumps
Danny Mayer
mayer at ntp.isc.org
Thu Apr 3 03:04:30 UTC 2008
David Woolley wrote:
> starlight at binnacle.cx wrote:
>> The generic version of 'ntpd' has some sophisticated code that
>>
>> handles interpolation. See the source. Power management is
>
> I know that. But the problem is that normal applications just get a
> more accurate time for the most recent tick, but still don't see any
> times between ticks.
>
>> Pings are consistently 400 microseconds and 'ntpq -p' reports 800
>
> Which is excessive for 1GHz network doing essentially nothing but NTP.
>
>> probably have make use of PTP (precision timing protocol).
>> Still très expensive.
>
> I assume by PTP you mean ethernet cards that extract a timestamp with a
> very low latency. I doubt that this will help with lost interrutps. If
> you really want extreme accuracy for applications you need to:
>
> 1) use hardware that maintains a high resolution time completely
> independent of the software and is directly readable by application code
> (I'm not sure if Windows supports such direct reading).
>
I suspect that what is being discussed here is IEEE1588 which can
timestamp packets via the hardware. It requires device driver support
and a number of other changes to NTP to work with it.
Danny
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