[ntp:questions] Hints to write a clock driver

Juergen Beisert jbeisert at netscape.net
Mon Jun 1 14:34:26 UTC 2009


Hi Frank,

Frank Kardel wrote:
>> currently I'm trying to write a clock driver for my selfmade USB
>> based DCF77 receiver. Communication works trough the "usblib", there is
>> no kernel driver involved. But now I'm in trouble how to forward the time
>> to the NTPD. There are various DCF77 drivers in the ntp source tree. But
>> they all are based on a serial device. I have no. I have to poll my USB
>> device two times a second.
>
> Hmmm, the basic heartbeat of ntpd is at once per sec. Going faster will
> be requiring some work.

I do not want ntpd to call my driver more than once a second. Polling my USB
device is (currently) done in a separate thread.

> Also we try to avoid any lengthy synchronous transactions where ntpd
> processing is blocked for longer times. Thus an asynchronous programming
> model has evolved where the request to the device are sent via the
> transmit path or the periodic 1 sec call for refclocks.

Who is called once a second? "struct refclock.clock_poll"?

> Results are processed as they arrive via the input loop (in Unix-like
> environments when the SIGIO/SIGPOLL signal arrives).

Triggered by the serial device for the DCF77 clock drivers for example? Or
triggered by the clock driver itself?

> For this to work the communication library should provide means to
> facilitate asynchronous notification or the interactions (request/reply)
> need to be short and the timestamping problem (fetching the local time at
> the second event) needs to be solved. 

As the communication with the USB device is done in a asynchronous thread,
reading the decoded time will be very short. Only someone must call a read
function (and currently I guess it is struct refclock.clock_poll that gets
called, right?)
 
>> My clock device generates a data set with a reference second pulse -
>> synced to/by the DCF signal - and also provides the raw bit information
>> sent via DCF in 59 bits for the next minute (one bit per second like the
>> DCF77 signal does, but already filtered and converted to binary data). Is
>> there a way to use anything from the libparse/ directory to let it decode
>> the DCF bit stream, but _not_ registering and using a serial device?
>
> You could extract that code. See libparse/clock_rawdcf.c.
> cvt_rawdcf() converts serial 50 baud data to 1/0 sequences - You solved
> that already. convert_rawdcf() converts the bit sequence to a time.

I saw the code in libparse/clock_rawdcf.c. I wanted to avoid to copy it. But
it seems to be the easiest way. :-(

> Another way to do it, is to use the shm driver. Create a program that
> controls your device and does the timestamping. This program can feed
> ntpd via shared memory with the data. No need to mess with ntpd at all.
> See gpsd for an example of an implementation.

I saw this code already. But when the ntpd calls one of my registered clock
driver functions periodically I will be more happy.

Thanks for your help.
Juergen




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