[ntp:questions] NTP.ORG MEINBERG KEEP TIME ACCURATE to 10MS

unruh unruh at invalid.ca
Thu Nov 15 08:23:14 UTC 2012


On 2012-11-15, David Taylor <david-taylor at blueyonder.co.uk.invalid> wrote:
> On 15/11/2012 07:22, unruh wrote:
> []
>> Actually more like 2 microseconds accuracy should be possible, unless
>> the Raspberry Pi's servicing of the GPIO interrupt is really very bad.
>>
>>>
>>>     http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Raspberry-Pi-NTP.html
>>
>> Nice page.
>
> Glad you liked the write-up.  Just some notes for myself, really!
>
> If you search for "latency" here:
>
>    http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=13883
>
> "jbeale" says: "My experiments with NTP-PPS timing in the 3.1.9 kernel 
> with a relatively unloaded system indicate that my R-Pi has an interrupt 
> latency ranging between 10 and 80 microseconds, and occasionally gets as 
> long as 150 microseconds (see below)"

Hm. Looks pretty bad. 
I once did tests with a 300MHz Linux machine, where I would send out a
signal on one of the output pins on the parallel port, reading the time
at which I did so,  and then read in the time on the Ack interrupt driven pin
and found delays typically of 1-2 microseconds (timing only to the
microsecond due to the clock reading function I used). That he seems to
be betting up to 150us delay is really bad. 

  
>
> and provides a graph of some values he has seen.  I haven't made any 
> direct measurements.  On my system here, the offsets reported by NTP are 
> less, but it would not show any fixed interrupt latency.  It's all well 
> within the 10 milliseconds requirement, of course.
>
>    http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/2012-11-01-02-03-raspi1_ntp-day.png
>    http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/2012-11-08-09-10-raspi1_ntp-day.png
>
> with glitches due to restarts.  Zero offset is plotted as 20 microseconds.



More information about the questions mailing list